America’s uneven crime spike

Violence in a few major cities drove the national murder rate higher in 2016, according to new FBI statistics.

The FBI’s latest crime report isn’t heartening. Murders in the United States rose by almost 9 percent last year, the FBI reported Monday, mirroring similar increases in other forms of violent crime. The homicide spike is one of the sharpest one-year upticks since the Great American Crime Decline in the 1990s, and, when combined with 2015’s numbers, marks only the second two-year increase since the 1980s.

But a deeper dive into Monday’s stats doesn’t suggest that the United States is backsliding to the high-crime years of the late 1980s and early 1990s. Instead, the FBI’s data points to sharp geographic disparities in violent crimes in American society, with a few major cities accounting for large portions of 2016’s growth in murders and other serious offenses.