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Notes -
Gary had 52 homicides in 2023, a per-100k rate of 76.8. This is a third higher than Baltimore, and 12x the rate of the US as a whole.
And they were a little proud of that number, because it was 18% fewer homicides than in 2022.
Time for a little math. Let's make a simplified model of Gary where the population is gender balanced, and equally age distributed between age 0 and 65. Let's further say that males age 15-30 represent 75% of homicide victims.
Among this sliver of the population the murder rate is 499 per 100,000!
A 15 year old boy in Gary will have a nearly 7.5% chance of being murdered before age 30.
Obviously there are all sorts of problems with the model, but it should be mostly accurate. I think it's possible that a quarter of adult men in Gary have been shot at some point.
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Well, I can't argue with that. I just wonder where they were happening, and over what. I admit I didn't go into the residential areas much.
That's still only 1 murder a week, and a population who goes 99.9% unmurdered each year. Hard to casually distinguish from 0 and 100%; it just adds up over time.
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