Tucson Sets Homicide Record
Arizona Daily Star January 9, 2021: A record-breaking year of homicides,Tucson police combat gun violence
The headline referenced above is about my hometown of Tucson setting a record for homicides in 2021: 93 homicides for a city of 542,629 people. That comes to one homicide for every 5,834 people. (Another half-million people live in the metro area outside of the city.)
By contrast, New York City had one homicide for every 16,969 people.
The article that comes with the headline equates homicides with gun violence, as if murder by gun is a new phenomenon and that people had been killing each other with lances in previous years.
The article continues: “Hall [the chief of police] also said it is clear that the homicides disproportionately impacted minority communities. According to Hall, in Tucson in 2021, 26% of the victims were Black, 53% were Latino and 2% were Native American.”
The chief didn’t say that blacks are only 5.2% of the city’s population, and Latinos, 43.6%. This means that the murder rate for blacks is five times higher than their representation in the city’s population. Curiously, the chief did not give the race, color, or ethnicity of the perpetrators. Wouldn’t it be helpful to know who is killing so many blacks? White supremacists? Jews? Asians? Scandinavians? Other blacks?
It also would be helpful to know how many murders are due to drug dealing, drug addiction, and/or gang activity.
By the way, years ago when I had a column in the Arizona Republic, I was invited to a presentation by the Scottsdale Police Department gang squad. They said that young male emigrants from Mexico who emigrated alone without family members were committing a disproportionate percentage of murders and other crimes in metro Phoenix, as part of a gang initiation rite. That had a familiar ring to this Italian because young male Italian immigrants used to commit crimes in New York and other big cities to become made-men in the Mafia. I wonder if it’s verboten today to make such points.