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To put this increase into context, the homicide rate in Chicago reached its recent peak in the early 1990s—the height of the nationwide crack cocaine epidemic—at 33 per 100,000. Since then it has declined by more than half, reaching a low of almost 15 per 100,000 in 2014. The increase in our homicide rate the past two years (from 15.1 to 27.8 per 100,000) has eroded approximately two thirds of the decrease Chicago experienced since the early 1990s. The size of Chicago’s increase in homicides is not unprecedented, but is rare for a city its size. In 2015, the U.S. experienced the largest single year increase in its homicide rate since 1990, according to the most recently available data from the FBI.3 In that year, cities like Baltimore, Milwaukee, and Washington, D.C. saw their homicide rates grow at least as fast as Chicago’s did in 2016. Early indications suggest that homicide rates also increased in many other cities around the U.S. in 2016.4 However, all of the cities that experienced one- or two-year increases in gun violence as large as Chicago’s have much smaller populations than ours. None of the other five largest cities in the U.S.—Houston, Los Angeles, New York City, and Philadelphia, in addition to Chicago—has witnessed a single-year homicide increase over the past 25 years that rivals Chicago’s increase in 2016. Chicago is an outlier with respect to total homicides but not homicide rates per capita. Chicago has more total homicides than any other U.S. city because of its size combined with its higher homicide rate per capita relative to that of the other largest cities in the country. But compared to all cities in the U.S., Chicago’s homicide rate per 100,000 residents is about in the middle of the pack. Even after its recent increase, Chicago’s homicide rate remains lower than that of (smaller) cities like Detroit, New Orleans, or St. Louis. Chicago’s homicide increase was sudden and sustained. As recently as December 2015, nothing in the data foreshadowed what would happen in 2016. Homicides in December 2015 were actually down slightly from December 2014, consistent with the larger pattern that we have seen in recent years where some months have more homicides than the same month in the prior year, while other months have fewer.5 Chicago’s increase in homicides began suddenly in January 2016, when the number of victims rose by 67 percent from January of the year before. Almost each month that followed in 2016 saw more homicides compared to the same month in 2015.6 Chicago’s increase in homicides in 2016 was due mostly to additional gun homicides. In 2016, 90 percent of the city’s homicides were committed with a firearm, up from 88 percent in 2015. By comparison, the share of homicides committed with a firearm in 2016 was 58 percent in New York City, 72 percent in Los Angeles, 80 percent in Houston, and 84 percent in Philadelphia. Gun homicides drive the difference between higher- and lower-homicide cities. Most of the difference in overall homicide rates across the five largest U.S. cities is driven by the difference in their gun homicide rates. The non-gun homicide rate is much more similar across these cities. The reason Chicago has a high overall homicide rate is entirely due to its elevated gun homicide rate.