We have expended considerable bandwidth reporting on the homicide rate in the City of Brotherly Love, which has seen 408 homicides in 272 days, an even 1.500 homicides per say, for a projected total for the year, assuming the current rate remains constant, of 548 souls sent untimely to their eternal rewards.
But what about Lexington, Kentucky, the closest large city to me, and where I lived from 1971 through 1984. According to the Lexington Police Department, there have been 28 murders in the city thus far in 2021, 28 in nine months of the year. If the rate continues, the city would be projected to see 37 homicides for the entire year. Compared to Philadelphia’s current 408, that doesn’t sound like much, but when you consider that 2019 set a city record with 30, which was then topped by 34 killings in 2020, it’s a lot.
Of course, like so many other places, the bad guys are lousy shots. All 28 homicides so far were committed by firearms, which makes the relationship with the city’s reported shootings a tight one. Thus far, the police have reported 101 non-fatal shootings. Looks like the bad guys manage to actually kill their intended targets 21.71% of the time![1]With the last reported shooting being on September 19th, the LPD is a bit behind on keeping the data up to date. The Herald-Leader reported a shooting as having occurred “just be fore … Continue reading
The Lexington Police Department keeps statistics strangely. The shootings data include the race of the victims while the homicide chart does not. Of the 101 shootings reported as of September 19th, 77 of the victims were black, 16 were white, and 8 were listed as Hispanic. According to the 2020 Census, the city’s population was 323,152, and was 74.9% white, 14.6% black, 7.2% Hispanic and 3.8% bi- or multi-racial; the white, black and multi-racial percentages include Hispanics, and while the figures note that 71.0% are non-Hispanic white, the figures do not report the non-Hispanic black percentage.
So, with black Lexingtonians being 14.6% of the population, why have they been the victims in 76.24% of the shootings? And why does the city not show the information on how many murder victims were black? I suspect that it is, in the words of the Sacramento Bee, such would be “perpetuating stereotypes about who commits crime in our community.”
Sadly, the Lexington Police Department hasn’t been doing too well in solving the homicides. In only 11 of the 28 killings has a suspect been identified. That’s a clearance rate of 39.29%. They did better in 2020, with arrests in 28 out of 34 murders, one of which only resulted in arrests this week.
Lexington’s homicide rate in 2020 was 10.52 per 100,000 population, which doesn’t in any way compare to Philadelphia’s but it’s still way too high. With a guesstimated 2021 population of 324,604, if the city does see that projected 37 homicides, it would mean that the homicide ticked up to 11.40 per 100,000. That’s not a good thing.
References