Downplaying the recent uptick in the homicide rate distracts from the fact that there is more than one America when it comes to violent crime: indeed, 51 percent of all U.S. murders are committed in just 2 percent of the nation’s counties, according to the Crime Prevention Research Center.Mangual's point is that cities aren't uniformly homicidal across their entire territories, the murder is concentrated in poor, mostly minority neighborhoods. What strikes me is that this is nothing new.
Before he married, my father was among other things an investigator for the Los Angeles city prosecutor. Decades later he told me something I found hard to believe as a youngster, and completely understand as a too-senior adult.
He said in the poor sections of LA there was approximately a murder a day, and most of these never made the pages of the major LA papers, at that point the Times and the Examiner. Since we had until quite recently lived in a middle class LA neighborhood and saw no violence, I found it hard to credit at the time.
Now I know he was correct; he was describing what happened in the 1920s and 30s. Can you imagine those poor neighborhoods are less lethal today? In fact they're much worse, notably in Chicago.
