Homicide by the numbers

All told, Richmond saw 41 murders in 2009. We’ve pulled the specifics and put together a few helpful graphs so you can see how things break down…

January 12, 2010; 6:00 AM • by Ross Catrow

The Richmond Times Dispatch ran an article this weekend detailing the area’s homicides from 2009. To make things a bit easier to process, we’ve put together a pictorial exploration of the data. If you are interested in crunching the numbers yourself, we’ve also made the Richmond homicide data available as a Google spreadsheet.

All told, Richmond saw 41 murders in 2009, including two killings that were ruled justified — that’s up from 2008’s 36 murders, four of which were also ruled justified. Here’s how the 2009 numbers break down…

Interesting numbers

• The longest stretch without a killing was 38 days and included the entire month November.
• There were 28 killings in the first six months of the year but only 12 in the last six months.
• The average age of victims was 33, while the median was 30. The youngest victim was two, the oldest 56.

’09 homicides by month

Running contrary to conventional Richmond wisdom that the violence rises with the temperature, there were 20 murders in the Spring — just shy of 50% of the year’s total count. Our warmest months saw considerably less activity.

’09 homicides by area of town

The South Side of Richmond had 43% of the city’s homicides. Notably, the city’s East End had nine homicides, down from 12 in 2008.

’09 homicides by motive

Robberies accounted for 34% of homicides in 2009.

’09 homicide map

Legend: Red: Abuse, White: Accidental, Blue: Argument, Grey: Domestic, Purple: Drugs, Yellow: Retaliation, Green: Robbery, Black: Unknown

View ’09 homicides in a larger map

Yearly homicides since 1992

This data is available as a public Google Docs spreadsheet.

 

(Special thanks to John Murden for helping us out with the data.)

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