[UPDATED] This is a huge political year in Rochester, so almost any development can take on political overtones. Still, it’s sad to see what happened with a routine but important academic report on Rochester’s homicide rate.

Earlier this month, the Center for Public Safety Initiatives at RIT released its annual report on the city’s homicides for the previous year. As in the past, it wasn’t a broad look at violent crime in Rochester. It was just a report that the center does every year, listing the total number of homicides and the rate per 100,000 residents and comparing those numbers to those of 24 other cities.

Not surprisingly, the report says that Rochester has a “moderately high homicide rate” when compared to the other cities. Some cities have a higher rate (St. Louis, New Orleans, and Detroit the highest), and some have a lower rate (New York, San Diego, and Colorado Springs the lowest).

Both the number and the rate of homicides grew in Rochester last year.

You can see why someone running against Mayor Lovely Warren might try to capitalize on that news – and why Warren might attack the report. And indeed, that’s what happened.

Warren said the report “lacks important context and does an incredible disservice to the men and women of the Rochester Police Department and the citizens of this great city.” The number of homicides includes several multiple-victim homicides. But the number of individual shooting incidents actually dropped in 2016, by 20 percent, she said. By not including that fact, she said, the report “creates the false impression that the number of incidents of violent crime are rising when in fact they are falling.”

Jim Sheppard, the former police chief hoping to unseat Warren, responded by implying that she wasn’t sensitive to the homicide victims’ families. He accused Warren of trying to “spin” the report, of “sidestepping and avoiding” its findings.

Warren’s other Democratic challenger, Rachel Barnhart, was the only one who instead emphasized the long-term upward trend. Barnhart called for better police-community relations and “a real plan to reduce poverty, create jobs, and provide opportunity.”

Frankly, if I were the mayor, I’d have embraced the report. Standing at a press conference, an arm around a cop on each side of me, I’d have said that the report shows how serious our violence problem is – that it underscores that our dedicated police officers cannot do the impossible.

I’d have said that violence is not a problem of policing. It’s a terrible, complicated societal problem, born out of poverty, unemployment, drug addiction, despair. Police cannot solve those problems.

I would have noted the efforts of my administration – the efforts to reduce the number of shootings and build better police-community relations, the city’s leadership in the anti-poverty initiative. I’d have said that this report shows again the importance of sensible gun-control measures.

And I would have noted the report’s most important finding. The actual big news.

And that is this, from the report’s conclusion: “By any way that it is measured, Rochester has a serious violence problem and has had it, uninterrupted, for nearly 50 years.”

Our violence problem has continued, uninterrupted, for nearly 50 years.

The problem dates back, in fact, to the administration of another Democratic mayor, Frank Lamb. Should we blame Lamb for the violence?

Our homicide rate has increased as middle and upper-income residents moved to the suburbs, the city’s population shrank, and the poverty rate grew. This isn’t the fault of a mayor. It’s not the fault of a police force.
And, in fact, the report makes exactly that point: “The uniformity of the trend means that no city administration or associated law enforcement agency has fared better or worse, and there is no justified criticism of one more than another.”

As the report says, we need a “serious and significant community wide plan and effort” to deal with this. Instead, the important message of a significant annual report on one of this community’s biggest challenges will be buried in the noise of a heated election campaign.

We have to do better than this.

(This article has been updated to include Rachel Barnhart’s response to the report.)

This article appears in Feb 22-28, 2017.

Mary Anna Towler is a transplant from the Southern Appalachians and is editor, co-publisher, and co-founder of City. She is happy to have converted a shy but opinionated childhood into an adult job. She...

18 replies on “Politics, violence, and the city’s mayoral race”

  1. A well-thought out article. The problems have been here for decades and the only way to address them is to attack poverty levels

  3. Why are you only featuring the statement of one mayoral candidate? Warren has yet to officially announce her bid for re-election. There are presently two candidates who have formally announced their intent yet you only mention one in your article? Seems strange and intentionally selective.

  4. Why the apparent selectivity in mayoral candidate positions? We have two candidates who have announced their intent to run (Mayor Warren is not yet one of them) and yet you only reference one of them. Seems like an intentional omission…

  6. The uniformity of the trend means that no city administration or associated law enforcement agency has fared better or worse, and there is no justified criticism of one more than another.

    In other words, a nice way to say they’ve all been equally bad.

  7. I can only assume that Mary Anna Towler is suffering from a serious medical condition that would cause her to forget that they’re two announced candidates for Mayor, and Lovely Warren isn’t one of them. I’m pretty sure you’ve reported this face. Do you read the stories in your own paper, before writing new columns?

    City Newspaper needs to make amends immediately. After a series of biased, erroneous, and poorly sourced articles this election season, I’d think you’d want to clean up your act.

  9. Does your headline refer to the political games you are playing by purposefully not including both candidates for mayor? Come on guys, you are better than this foolishness.

  11. Actually Homicides have been increasing over all in most major cities. The theory is that police have become less aggressive following many high profile prosecutions of Officers. (Ferguson effect)
    More time and data will be required to know for sure but police officers I know will admit it is having an effect .
    http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/st…

  13. Numbers alone are next to useless. There are lots of questions left unanswered by just presenting numbers, or accompanying them with broad generalizations. In any research, context is critical. On that score, Warren is partly right. In addition to the new Gun Court, we need to understand what these numbers mean by getting much more detail. The media often fails the community when writes a story without adequate context.

  14. The media reported that in Cleveland in 2015, 101 of the 120 homicides involved guns. This sounds like the liberal anti-gun bias that it is. We should be provided with details of each individual incident. We all know, that unless you get too close to an MRI scanner, guns don’t just jump up and fire off rounds by themselves. And what about the 19 homicides that didn’t involve guns? More balanced reporting please. I’m sick of being told what to believe.

    (Note: According to the RIT report, there were 78 homicides in Cleveland during 2015. Several articles I read stated that there were 120.)

    I thought there was a big spike in homicides right after Lovely Warren was elected. I needed this article to prove me wrong. I’ll admit to having imagined something that didn’t pan out to be the reality and I don’t think I’m the only one who had such thoughts.

  15. For those who want facts, not City Newspaper spin, here they are, from the RIT report: “In Rochester, NY, there were 42 reported homicides in 2016, with a rate of 20.02 per 100,000 residents. This was the City’s highest homicide rate over the past six years…”

    Rochester ranked 12th out of 24 cities, just a shade better than number 11 Washington, D.C. Of the 24 cities, Rochester recorded the 7th biggest increase in homicides from 2015 to 2016, an increase of 27.27%.

    ” Since 1969, the population in Rochester has been steadily decreasing from a population of about 295,000 in the 1970 U.S. Census, to 232,000 in 1990, and, finally, an estimated 209,802 in 2015. The number of homicides in the city of
    Rochester has also been slightly increasing, leading to a gradual increase in the rate of homicides per 100,000 residents over time, with a rate of 11.86 in 1969 and a rate of 20.02 in 2016.”

    So between 1969 and 2016, we have a near doubling of the homicide rate as the city has lost almost 29% of its population over the same period. This is not progress, no matter what kind of spin City Newspaper wants to put on the facts.

  16. Towler wants to lay all of the blame for Rochester’s high homicide rate on poverty. It has a poverty rate of 33% and a homicide rate of 20. Albany NY has a poverty rate of 29% but a homicide rate only one tenth of that of Rochester. Somehow, poverty does not seem to be the deciding factor. And Hartford CT has a poverty rate of 31% but a homicide rate a little over half of Rochester. A point of comparison to Hartford is that Anchorage has the same homicide rate as them but a poverty rate of 12%. Again, there seems to be something other than poverty at work.

    Towler seems to be rather anxious to give Warren a free pass on this. The three main issue for voters of almost anyplace are the economy, schools, and crime. Warren avoids the schools like the plague, so we know how that item is going. How about the other two?

  17. Then again, maybe it’s the homicide rate that causes the businesses and people with the means to leave, leading to poverty left behind.

  18. There is a difference between correlation and causation. Overall higher poverty rates correlate with higher Homicide rates. Yet throughout most of U.S. history , including the Great Depression ,we were poorer but homicides were much lower. There are two kinds of poverty . Systemic poverty that is beyond the control of the individual (Depressions etc) and also poverty that is a consequence of an individuals bad choices. The second kind of poverty will correlate with higher Homicide rates.
    The cause of this is not the poverty itself but the factors such as addictions, having children without jobs, Domestic Violence in the home etc. that led to it.

Comments are closed.