Cincinnati Post: Homicides approaching record

November 29, 2003

It's been another brutal year on Cincinnati streets, with 2003's homicide rate approaching the 66 killings that tied a 15-year high last year. As of Friday, 61 people had been killed in Cincinnati.

Although drugs are at the root of many of the slayings, there have been notable exceptions.

One of the most infamous is the death of 81-year-old Lavern Jansen, whose killer followed her home from a neighborhood pharmacy and overpowered her in her Covedale home March 19. Police, who have yet to make an arrest in the case, have not disclosed how she was killed.

"That's a very sad case," said Police Lt. Kim Frey, commander of the homicide unit. "She's not out dealing drugs. She's not out standing on a street corner. It's a horrible, horrible crime."

As disturbing as the particular circumstances of some of the slayings are, the raw homicide statistics for Cincinnati are perhaps even more troubling. In recent years, Cincinnati's homicide total has been substantially higher than that of some much bigger cities typically thought to have worse crime problems.

Rising crime isn't unique to Cincinnati, Mayor Charlie Luken countered. After several years of decline throughout the 1990s, many cities are seeing more homicides.

"There's evidence that this is a phenomenon," Luken said. "In Columbus, they're approaching 100, but it's an unacceptable circumstance." (Columbus last year had 129 homicides, roughly twice Cincinnati's total. With a population of about 712,000, however, that city also is about twice Cincinnati's size.)

Cincinnati's 66 homicides in 2002 compared unfavorably, for example, to the 47 homicides in 1.2-million population San Diego, the 58 killings in San Francisco (population 791,000) and the 53 deaths in Denver (569,000 residents). The city's 2002 homicide total also was more than twice that of San Jose (population 913,000), where there were 28 killings last year, and the 26 homicides in Seattle (population 572,000).

With a population of 330,000, Cincinnati's 66 homicides in 2002 represented 20 killings per 100,000 residents, well above the 13.73 average for 32 major U.S. cities analyzed in one study by a Washington public safety watchdog group. That rate placed Cincinnati in some most unwelcome company, alongside such cities as Chicago (22.2 homicides per 100,000 residents), Philadelphia (19 per 100,000) and Los Angeles (17.5), according to FBI crime statistics. The nation's "murder capital" last year was Washington, D.C., where the city's 262 homicides equaled 45.8 per 100,000 residents.

"I'm very concerned about the homicide rate," said Pat DeWine, outgoing chairman of council's law committee. "The city is not as safe as it should be."

Throughout the just-completed council election, DeWine often cited one statistic that he argued vividly made his point. In 1990, DeWine told campaign audiences, a person was 2½ times more likely to become a homicide statistic in New York than in Cincinnati. Last year, those numbers were reversed, he said.

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