Guy Gordon (00:01.14)
Hello and welcome to the hashtag facts matter podcast. I’m Guy Gordon. This is a production of the citizens research council of Michigan on a bashedly unbiased passionately nonpartisan and dedicated to the proposition that facts should drive policy, not politics. Today we’re talking murder and we’re talking homicide. And before you think we’re dipping our toe into true crime podcasts or a mimicking date line, cue the law and order music.

We’re going to be looking at the recent headlines about Detroit’s crime statistics, all of them apparently very encouraging that we’ve seen the lowest number of homicides since 1964, certainly suggesting a lot of progress, given how that number has dogged this city for so many decades. But it’s important to understand this progress, in quotes, that we look at the perspective and context for those numbers. And for that, we invite in Eric Lufer,

President of the Citizens Research Council of Michigan. Hello, Eric. And Douglas Ortiz, Director of the Detroit Bureau for the CRC, who is going to outline and break down his most recent paper, which you can find at crcmish.org. Hello, Douglas. Before we dive into the numbers, and I think there is so much illumination in your paper here, but let’s just put it a context, the importance of this number for Detroit.

Eric Lupher (00:59.403)
Hello?

Douglas Ortiz (01:13.144)
Good morning.

Guy Gordon (01:25.726)
The homicide rate and the homicide number isn’t just a data point. It has been one of the significant drivers of both the external and internal image of the city. is it still as important and tell me why we need to care about

Douglas Ortiz (01:47.66)
We are residents of Detroit. have, based on surveys, consistently said that public safety is a major issue. And the crime that gets reported most to police agencies is homicide. So it made sense for our first paper on crime in public safety in Detroit to focus on the homicide rate. And it’s frequently

When Mayor Sheffield’s talking about crime, we’re looking at like the absolute number of homicides or murders in the city.

Guy Gordon (02:20.978)
Right, which may be a nice storyline, but it isn’t a very broad or contextualized storyline. basically, what we can say is, for the better part of the last several decades, and certainly the last two administrations, it has been their focal point and has consumed a significant amount of resources.

Douglas Ortiz (02:32.151)
Thank you.

Eric Lupher (02:46.432)
I think the external context is as important as the internal context that Doug highlights, right? Detroit for a long time had the reputation as murder capital of America and sort of why would you want to go to Detroit? You risk your safety. And now we see that that rate is going down and there’s reason to.

want to visit, more importantly, live there and put your business there and have some faith in the changing culture that things are getting better. yes, the residents prioritize this, but we want to sell Detroit as a great place to be and people can get past some of these numbers, understand the value of the city.

Guy Gordon (03:38.61)
Yeah, and don’t don’t understate how important the the phrase murder capital has become, which is a media generated phenomenon. And it’s it’s consumed an awful lot of ink over the years. And the fact is, the sheer number of homicides isn’t nearly as important as the homicide rate. So let’s talk about that. In terms of the homicide rate.

not just the number of total homicides which has seen a precipitous drop to the levels of nineteen sixty four but when we look at homicides and adjust for population at one hundred thousand douglas how are we doing

Douglas Ortiz (04:20.237)
Pretty good. As you can see from that chart right there, the homicide rate in 2024, which is the latest data we have, shows about 31 homicides per 100,000 people. And we use the homicide rate so we can compare across cities because every city has a different population. So you can see that it’s been on the decline since 2022.

and at its lowest since the last decade.

Guy Gordon (04:51.37)
Do we know how that compares for Detroit at least going back decades? it, and then we don’t have the numbers in, should point out for 25 yet. but nationally, at least some of the predictions I’ve seen have said that this could have been the safest year ever in terms of a national homicide rate. You’d have to go back to the early 1900s to find one as low when we were largely a rural.

a very rural country.

Douglas Ortiz (05:26.669)
We, our data only went back to 2016. The national homicide rate is about five homicides per 100,000 people. This, yeah.

Guy Gordon (05:42.336)
So we’re still significantly higher. We should also point out that in terms of the national trend, I think there was a 23 % drop in the homicide rate. Ours was quite a bit higher than that. So we’re about eight points better than the national drop over the past few years.

Douglas Ortiz (06:00.301)
From 2022 to 2024, Detroit’s homicide rate fell by 37%. So that’s a pretty sizable decline.

Guy Gordon (06:06.848)
Right. Yeah. Okay. So in terms of the, the, the murder rate still higher, significantly higher than the national average in terms of pure cities, how are we doing? Because that 31.4 seems like it’s really good.

Douglas Ortiz (06:28.279)
Well, as you can see from that chart right there, when you contextualize it with other cities, it could be a lot better compared to when we stack the homicide rate up against other cities like Newark, Toledo, Buffalo. We can see that Detroit has quite a high homicide rate relative to these pure cities that we selected. It’s more than twice that of Buffalo, Newark, and Toledo.

Most of these peer cities you see on the graph right there have less than 25 homicides per 100,000 people. And Buffalo, Newark, and Toledo have less than 15 homicides. So that 30-ish homicides per 1,000 that Detroit has, yeah, it doesn’t seem as great when you’re looking at this context.

Guy Gordon (07:18.964)
Right, even though it’s a significant drop. So we’ve established the what, and it’s really kind of good news, bad news. We have seen a precipitous drop. It looks like that the U.S. homicide rate could fall even more in 25 from 5.1 per 100,000 to 3.9 for 100,000 based on the projections that are available now. And that could be the lowest since we started keeping track of this. Do we know, let’s talk about the whys a little bit here.

Douglas Ortiz (07:47.884)
Mm-hmm.

Guy Gordon (07:49.568)
what is behind those numbers in terms of social determinants that do we know what’s driving the decrease for instance

Douglas Ortiz (08:01.025)
We can see that from the data that crime spiked around the COVID pandemic and then has been steadily decreasing since for nationally and for most cities. Some of the factors that influence the murder rate or the homicide rate is poverty, income inequality, and family stability. When we looked at

Guy Gordon (08:28.522)
And we really have to separate, excuse me, those two. There’s economic inequality, there’s resource deprivation, and family disruption. These are two different categories, right?

Douglas Ortiz (08:43.309)
Resource deprivation is one of the theories that when communities are deprived of resources, people make this cost benefit analysis of whether it makes sense to commit a crime or, so that’s sort of like one of the underlying theories from criminology about what drives homicides and violent crimes.

Guy Gordon (09:11.218)
All right. All right. And taking that separately, this idea of resource deprivation, income inequality, lower wages, we’ve seen improvement in Detroit in terms of unemployment, in terms of wages. Again, it’s all relative to some degree, but we’ve seen a lot of improvement in that regard. So in that social determinant, this idea of, of economic disruption, how impactful has that been to our homicide numbers and our improvement?

Douglas Ortiz (09:43.298)
I think this paper, what it does is contextualizes a lot of this. When you look at Detroit just by itself, things look good. The poverty rate looks good. The homicide rate looks good. But comparing it to some of these other peer cities on poverty, Detroit had both the lowest median household income and the highest share of residents living in poverty relative to those peer cities that we were showing you like Toledo, Cleveland, Rochester.

Guy Gordon (10:09.024)
Mm-hmm.

Douglas Ortiz (10:13.099)
And then also it had the second highest share of single parent households with children among those peer cities as well. So given that, it does seem like those are likely driving factors, structural determinants that are contributing to that elevated homicide rate we’re seeing in Detroit compared to most other cities.

Guy Gordon (10:35.092)
to ask you to speculate just a little bit here because one of the data points, and Eric you may want to weigh in on this, one of the social phenomenons we’ve seen in the past 10 years is a big drop in the number of teen pregnancies. We used to point to crime and say well it’s because babies are having babies and these children are uncareful and they grow up to be you know unguided and you know poorly parented young adults.

We really can’t say that and we may not be able to say that to the same degree in the future. I mean, is there a kind of a buried good, good news story demographically that because these children aren’t being born into those circumstances between, don’t have teen mothers that get derailed by that, that we may see better outcomes, even better outcomes in the future, given that kind of social change we’ve seen.

Eric Lupher (11:28.779)
think for sure that that trend is heading in the right direction. We shouldn’t paint a picture that that’s not happening anymore. as we’ve made progress in helping young people navigate their decisions and find supporting systems, certainly that pays off in the long run for the community that children are growing up in more fulfilling

households, better structures, there’s resources to help them help the family navigate these types of things. So yeah, for sure, this is there has not been and there never will be a silver bullet to address these types of things. But this certainly one factor leading to the improvement, I think going forward.

Guy Gordon (12:24.36)
Yeah, I just wonder whether that’s a silver lining in process.

Eric Lupher (12:28.391)
I, yeah, for sure. Yeah. I don’t want to lose sight on the income inequality as a factor here as well. The city goes through a process twice a year of working with economists at the University of Michigan. And the reports that they do are really illuminating in the amount of income inequality. There’s a central business district in the

the new center area where there’s a lot of professionals working in high-rise buildings and making a high level. That benefits the city in tremendous ways with the resources available from income taxes levied on those people. But it can travel a mile in many directions from downtown and midtown and you see high levels of poverty.

high levels compared to anywhere in a first world country. Part of our problem in picking the pure cities was finding another city with poverty as deep as Detroit’s. So income inequality, right? Whether you’re a Detroiter comparing yourself to workers in those high rises or looking at the suburbs around you and the income inequality.

That’s going to continue to play a factor in addressing the income levels of Detroit residents, whether it is just having the resources as we were talking about with these single family households and things like that. As Doug says, they’re sort of conscious or unconscious that cost benefit of analysis of, you know, do I dare commit a crime?

If I get caught, what are the consequences? And if we continue to have too many families in circumstances where the benefits of being unincarcerated don’t affect them the same way of other people, it’s going to… Right. Right. That’s a good way to put it.

Guy Gordon (14:44.168)
Right. The opportunity cost of committing the crime. I guess the, but the other thing is, is looking at this to some degree, we have co-tailed our decline in the homicide rate has co-tailed the national average. Can we look at anything that’s been done? That’s Detroit specific in terms of policy. Certainly we have invested a lot in better policing, improving the type of policing we have here.

and we’ve invested in more cops on the streets under Mayor Duggan. Can we see any of those policies that have borne fruit, both in keeping families together or in addressing the income inequalities that is within our grasp to actually mitigate? We know a lot of this is determined by the national economic picture and things like that, but are there any local policies that we can point to for some of these improvements?

Eric Lupher (15:39.648)
Yeah, I think one of the dug in policies that, like in the big picture, the glacial sense of time, this is a really short term measure, but his administration really leaned into economic development for Detroiters. The idea of bringing the Stellantis plant into the East side and then prioritizing Detroiters to get those jobs as many as possible, as many as qualified to fill those jobs.

Guy Gordon (16:09.022)
Well, even did remedial training to get those people up skilled.

Eric Lupher (16:09.587)
And right, both for Stellantis and many other jobs trying to get the skills to do that. So it’s so early, it’s hard to draw a thick, firm line between those things. We maybe have to use dotted lines now until we can have better data and make those connections. But certainly there’s been a recognition of

Guy Gordon (16:15.07)
Yeah.

Eric Lupher (16:39.145)
of those relationships and some attempt to do something. And Doug maybe talk a little bit too about some of the street level efforts, the green light districts and spot shodder and some of those things.

Douglas Ortiz (16:56.327)
Yeah, Mayor Duggan had the green light program, the Project Green Light, where they have a constant video feed in certain locations where there is high rates of violence in specific areas. They’ll install that video feed that links directly up to DPD. So they’re like,

providing real time monitoring of that, of those certain problem areas. There’s also a shot spotter where if, you know, there’s a detection system in place in some areas of the city where if it’s alerted that there’s been some gunfire, that alerts the DPD and they can send police over there and check what’s going on.

Guy Gordon (17:52.832)
think there’s also been a change in prioritization, though, gentlemen, which was we used to view crime kind of, this is public perception. And I can tell you from a media standpoint that a crime against a stranger was covered differently and viewed differently than a domestic crime. But it both still influence your homicide rate. And so, I mean, there has been a greater

prioritization, I think, on addressing domestic violence. There had been in the past that I think has beneficial for a variety of reasons, obviously. Also blight removal, you’re removing venues for criminal activity. Just having the streetlights on again, you’re removing the shadows, which had certainly hidden criminal activity. But the domestic violence piece, I think, gets to the heart of we were very discriminatory in how we viewed murders.

both in the media and again outwardly of well we really cared more about those murders that happened against strangers because that seemed to impact our image more and of a city that’s unsafe and the kind of notion but those are the ones we got to do something about.

Eric Lupher (19:04.073)
I think that’s really insightful. There’s a greater recognition, not enough public resources going to it, but a greater recognition of the mental health issues of our citizens and the issues of domestic violence and the challenges of living, especially in poverty. It’s very stressful to live in poverty. So yeah, for sure, the

The recognition of the issues, the efforts to get in front of problems before they turn into homicides, separating, quarreling, know, adults, domestic, whether they’re married or not, you know, just separate yourselves, let cooler heads prevail. We see a better job of policing, we see better jobs of

Guy Gordon (19:46.773)
Mm-hmm.

Eric Lupher (20:01.735)
of crisis mitigation that maybe helps to contribute to these things. I keep thinking about these things always, you know, we want to, it’s a good news, bad news, right? We want to highlight the good news here that crime rates are going down and Detroit is starting to look like some of its peers, but there’s a long way to go and we shouldn’t miss that.

Guy Gordon (20:28.724)
Let ask you about that because one of the, you you and I both know that there are going to be people that go to their corners defensively here and say, well, wait a minute now, you can’t compare Detroit to Rochester, New York. We’re not at all like them. Go back and explain to us how you came up with our pure cities because we really do have a lot in common when you break us down demographics.

Douglas Ortiz (20:54.125)
Right. When we were looking at social factors that influence crime, population size, median household income, poverty, low unemployment, these cities were similar in terms of their large cities. They have similar poverty levels and median household incomes. They all have different population sizes, but that’s why we normalize the data with that homicide rate. So yeah, a lot of these cities

If you look at the census and compare all cities in the US, these cities are actually pretty similar to each other.

Guy Gordon (21:34.538)
The other question that I have is just the quality of the FBI data. There was a time not too long ago that there were some cities that were refusing to submit their crimes to the FBI to be counted. They felt that they weren’t being treated fairly, or maybe they just wanted to cover up the problem that they had in their particular city. But do you feel now that the uniform crime reporting statistics that we’re getting for the FBI are solid and that

Douglas Ortiz (21:39.725)
Mm-hmm.

Guy Gordon (22:03.228)
municipalities that we’re being compared to are submitting the data so the comparison is an honest one.

Douglas Ortiz (22:12.749)
think so. haven’t seen any recent news saying otherwise. What’s reported by the FBI Unified Crime Statistics is reported crime, crime that’s been reported by police agencies. There’s also another survey that I believe the Bureau of Justice, I’m forgetting the full acronym, but they actually do a larger survey where they’re polling people to see what actually,

they’re capturing unreported crime in that survey that they do as well. So those are two of the big data points we have, the FBI data and the survey that the Bureau of Justice does.

Eric Lupher (22:53.579)
Gary, in our industry, data is always an issue, right? The quality of the data. Something like this, it might not be perfect, but it’s the best available. It might not be, I have greater confidence in the homicide numbers than some of the other reports that we’ll do in the future looking at crime, property crimes and things like that. If you…

report something stolen and the police come and say, I’m sorry for your loss, but we’d have no hope of finding it or retrieving for you. You maybe don’t call the second or third time. If somebody’s dead, they’re dead. we have, we have higher confidence in that, but there’s always going to be issues of, reporting. And, for some things it’s the gatekeeper, right? This is not the chief of police.

Guy Gordon (23:31.316)
Yeah.

Eric Lupher (23:48.299)
putting these statistics together. It’s a low level technician charged with doing this. So we just sometimes have to take what we get.

Guy Gordon (23:51.667)
Right.

Guy Gordon (23:55.232)
That’s a really good point because the homicides are something that even in the absence of true reporting by the municipality or by the police department, that’s something that the media can keep track of because it is on the police blotter every day. And in many cases, the media did keep a running tally in those cities that weren’t participating. So we did get a pretty good idea of the level of homicides there. Just to recap, Douglas, we’re co-tailing on a nice national trend.

We dropped more in terms of the homicide rate than the nation did, but pure cities.

Douglas Ortiz (24:34.549)
Right, to recap, there’s been progress. Detroit’s made a lot of progress in reducing its homicide rate, but it’s still much elevated. It’s still higher than a lot of other peer cities that we looked at in this paper, six in total, Toledo, Cleveland. And there’s more work to be done to catch up to them.

Guy Gordon (24:55.802)
And in that work to be done for the incoming Sheffield administration, guess they’ve been in for six months, certainly investing in work training, upskilling, and education. Pay dividends in terms of your homicide rate.

Douglas Ortiz (25:14.187)
Right, and it seems like Mayor Sheffield is on the right track, focusing on taking a holistic approach, quote unquote, creating an office of violence prevention, focusing on interpersonal violence as well. So it does seem like she is taking a holistic approach, not just taking a policing law and order approach to crime. The research tells us that we need to

address the structural determinants of homicide. Family sedability, poverty, those are drivers of homicide and murder rates in urban areas.

Guy Gordon (25:54.036)
All right. Any last thoughts, Eric?

Eric Lupher (25:57.644)
No, this is the second of a series we’re doing. So next, as I suggested, we’re going to look at property crimes as Detroit relative to these peer cities again, and continue to work on this. So we appreciate the opportunity to dig into this and we’ll keep working on it.

Guy Gordon (26:19.072)
Yeah, and yeah, really nice work Douglas. you for that. Eric, before I let you leave is we’re fond of saying at the bottom of all of our papers, a fact tank can’t run on fumes. We invite anybody that both appreciates this podcast, appreciates the approach of the Citizens Research Council on fact-based research, that throwing a few pennies in the pot or even dollars would be better is a good thing and they can do that at crcmish.org.

Eric Lupher (26:47.211)
Yeah, we’re recording this on April 17th. That makes us 110 years and four days old. It was on April 13th in 1916 that the doors opened and the lights went on and the Detroit Bureau of Governmental Research got to work. So we continue to plug away on focusing on issues of Detroit as we have for 110 years. And we can only do this with support of businesses and people that benefit from

our nonpartisan independent research and even key approach to looking at the issues and helping policymakers and citizens understand the issues and take reason data-driven approaches to addressing these issues.

Guy Gordon (27:33.536)
All right, Eric, Doug, thanks very much. And thank you for joining us on this Facts Matter podcast. You can always find us. If you want to tell your friends about us, it’s hashtag facts matter. And you can find us at Spotify, Apple podcasts, wherever platform you might want to go to. And of course, YouTube. Until next time, I’m Guy Gordon. Take care.

Douglas Ortiz (27:36.513)
Thank you.

Eric Lupher (27:36.789)
Thank you.