A report on urban homicide rates from the Rochester Institute of Technology has Rochester Mayor Lovely Warren seething. In a statement, she calls it “an incredible disservice to the men and women of the Rochester Police Department.”
The report is from RIT’s Center for Public Safety Initiatives. It compares last year’s homicide rates in 24 cities, and it finds Rochester’s homicide rate increased by about 30 percent over 2015, the highest in six years.
The study finds some city murder rates went down, and some surged far more than Rochester’s. Cleveland’s homicide rate rose by more than 74 percent.
Mayor Warren issued a statement saying this paints an inaccurate picture of violent crime because it fails to account for the multiple-victim incidents that occurred. She says by number of incidents, the rate of violent crime is down.
The authors caution that murder rates fluctuate considerably for many reasons, but also say this shows a need to address problems with gun violence and high-risk offenders. They include graphs that do show the overall Rochester homicide trend peaked in the 90s and has been going down.