Essay On Trends In Murder Rate

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Recommended: Gang violence in society

Gary W. Simmons, Sr.
Figure box Assignment
Figure box 4.1 –Trends in Murder Rates, United States, 1900-2010
Page 89
Murder seems to engulf us. Each time the T.V. is turned on, or social media is engaged we a barraged with the latest horror stories of murder victims and the grief and unanswered questions left in their wake by inconsolable family and friends.
However, long-term trends following murder rates from 1900-2010 show some blatantly different information. Consider Figure 4.1 box in the class text. It illustrates the trends murder has taken in the US over decades. When numbers of murders first began being tracked in the 1900s it seemed that murder was rather low and stayed at about the same rate for a few years with less than two hundred murders per 100,000 persons. Unfortunately, despite this beginning things started changing rapidly about 1905. Murder started taking an upward climb at an alarming rate, peaking somewhere around 1935 numbering almost 1,000 murders per 100,000 people. From this graph one would question what happened during these years to precipitate such a jump.
The text suggests that one reason the trend shows when backed up with data collected from death certificates and other historical events of the period that states were beginning to input their deaths and causes of death into this newly available reporting system. This made it look as though murder was the new order of the day.1 It should also be noted that there most likely was some rise due to gangs then known as the Mafia Families that took hold of big cities such as Chicago, New York and New Orleans, only to mention a few.
This peak seen in 1935 began just as dramatic a decrease as there had been an increase. The decrease got to its lowest p...

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...ed in Houston, Texas several years ago, where several children at a birthday party were mistakenly killed because those doing the drive-by thought those they wanted to kill were there. Instead it was a group of ten year children. Gang wars are also common occurrences in large cities, where murder is often a rite of passage or an initiation into a gang. Gangs settle their own scores with murder rather than turning to police.
Large, dense populations tend to bring out the very worst in people. Poverty is also another marker which can help identify areas where more crime and higher murder rates can be found.
Putting together all this data with the results and long range patterns shown in this Table we as a nation, should be able to come up with solutions which would help us to bring down our death rate due to murder even lower, especially among this hardest hit group.

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