Slashdot Mirror
Murder Is Like a Disease (No, Really)
pigrabbitbear writes "With a homicide rate historically more than three times greater than the rest of the United States, Newark, N.J., isn't a great vacation spot. But it's a great place for a murder study (abstract). Led by April Zeoli, an assistant professor of criminal justice, a group of researchers at Michigan State University tracked homicides around Newark from 1982 to 2008, using analytic software typically used by medical researchers to track the spread of diseases. They found that "homicide clusters" in Newark, as researchers called them, spread and move throughout a city much the same way diseases do. Murders, in other words, did not surface randomly—they began in the city center and moved in 'diffusion-like processes' across the city."
The per capita homicide rate of the US was 4.4per in the last count, which sounds extremely high. For most Americans though, the "experienced" rate is much closer to Europe at 2.2per (same as Finland). You see, ~6% of the US population (African american males between 18-40) commit over half of all homicides (55% according to the 2010 FBI uniform crime report). If you scale down the rate at which black males commit homicide to be more in line with the percent of the population they represent, you're looking at European-level homicide rates. Now obviously there are a number of contributing factors to why this is occurring, most of them based on poverty, gang-related activity, and broken families/social structure for example. For the lion's share of the US population, our homicide rate is on par with Europe - it's only for tiny pockets of our population that the rate is extraordinarily high.