Where Gun Violence Is Surging

Taking a look at the few places seeing increasing gun viole

Two weeks ago I wrote about all the places that gun violence is falling, and there are a lot of them. Today’s post will look at the opposite: the small handful of places where gun violence appears to be surging. This is a much harder piece to write in a lot of respects because a) there are only a few places with clearly surging — rather than just a small increase — murder, b) none of the places with surging murders publish specifically shooting data, and c) trying to explain the outliers is more challenging than coming up with explanations for the norm.

Our YTD murder dashboard currently has YTD data for 171 cities and murder is down in around 70 percent of them. I set a few conditions out to identify the places where gun violence might be surging: recently updated data, enough murders so that a large percent change isn't just due to a low base rate, and a 20 percent or more increase in 2023 relative to 2022.

There are 77 cities that have data available through the end of September and had at least 20 or more murders through September 2022. Of the 77 cities that fit the above criteria, murder is up 20 percent or more in four of them while murder is down 20 percent or more in 31 of them. Seattle is close at +19.1 percent, but gun violence is clearly not surging in Seattle given that the city’s shooting data shows just one more shooting victim in 2023 than in 2022 through October.

The four cities with big rises in murder this year based on the above criteria are Memphis, Washington DC, Greensboro, and Shreveport. Other places are seeing increasing murders this year — like Dallas, Kansas City, and Columbus — but the increases are more muted and could be due to randomness given that none of these places provide shooting data.

The data available for the four cities of interest varies considerably. DC and Greensboro provide incident-level data which includes details of the weapon used. Memphis has incident-level data but does not include information on the weapon used. However, 92 percent of Memphis murders were via firearm in 2020 according to the FBI’s Supplementary Homicide Report, so it’s fair to assume that the incident-level murder trend is fairly identical to the incident-level fatal shooting trend. Shreveport only provides aggregate murder figures and does not break anything down by weapon used, so we’re going to ignore Shreveport for the rest of this piece because there isn't a ton we can say about those Cowboy fans from Louisiana.

So why is murder, and specifically fatal shootings, surging in these three cities while it plunges across much of the country? Graphing the change in murder rolling over 12 months in each city (see below) provides some clues but, unfortunately, no obvious answers.

One thing that jumps out is that these three cities look fairly similar to many of the cities where gun violence is plunging through the end of 2022. Murder is surging now in each city, but firearm murders were declining in DC, Memphis, and Greensboro in the latter half of 2022, so much so that all three had fewer firearm murders in 2022 than in 2021. That decline shifted to an increase sometime in the beginning of 2023, however, in all three cities.

There is a clear event that can be pointed to as potentially contributing to rising gun violence in Memphis — the killing of Tyre Nichols in early January 2023. David Graham has written numerous times about gun violence in Memphis in the wake of Nichols’ death for The Atlantic (see here and here). I’d recommend checking his writing out for better understanding the factors that be driving increasing gun violence there.

DC and Greensboro have no such obvious external events though. It does not make sense for increasing gun violence in those cities to be driven by the same factors that are driving killings in Memphis up while cities much closer geographically are not clearly affected.

I don’t really have any good theories or answers as to why fatal shootings are surging in DC and Greensboro. Some of it may be luck/randomness as the ratio of aggravated assaults with a firearm to fatal shootings has fallen substantially in both cities. (The incident-level offense data is not exactly apples to apples in DC and Greensboro, so don’t read too much into the ratios being pretty different between the cities).

Ratio of Aggravated Assault with a Firearm incidents to Fatal Shooting Incidents in DC and Greensboro, 2019 - 2023 (Source: MPDC and GPD)

Maybe there’s some bad luck/randomness happening in that a much higher share of incidents with gunfire are ending in a fatal shooting. But aggravated assaults are not synonymous with shootings and it’s impossible to say for sure without shooting data which neither city publishes.

The most compelling answer to this riddle, and it’s not really an answer, is that these cities are outliers because sometimes there are outliers. There are innumerable factors which cause murder to rise or fall in a city in a given year and our incomplete understanding of those factors means that we cannot say with confidence which are absent in an outlier.

Consider 1994 and 1996. Murder fell 5 percent nationally in 1994, but it rose nearly 10 percent in New Orleans to the most murders ever recorded there and the highest murder rate for a big city ever reported (that dubious record has since been broken). Murder similarly fell over 9 percent nationally in 1996 — the largest decline ever recorded, but murder rose over 10 percent in Washington, DC that year. Or take New Orleans last year where murder rose more than 20 percent to the highest rate in decades while murder fell nationally by 5 percent.

It’s hard to say for sure what is driving surging gun violent in the handful of cities where it is happening given the paucity of quality shooting data and inability to fully understand the factors involved. Gun violence in New Orleans this year, however, has plummeted, especially over the last few months giving hope that a similarly unexpected decline could suddenly take root elsewhere.