The Geography of Urban Violence

Their site, AmericanViolence.org, which was created with support from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, compiles data on murder rates for 80-plus cities over the period 1990 to 2017, spanning the high point of violent crime to the recent decline. The site fills a substantial void by organizing comprehensive, comparable data on murders and murder rates for these cities. Crime data are notoriously unreliable and hard to compare across cities because of differences in how crimes are cataloged and reported. To develop their database, the team supplemented data from the FBI Uniform Crime Reports with data from the Gun Violence Archive and from cities themselves.