Youngstown's homicide rate puts city among most deadly

If people were murdered in Youngstown at the national average, the city would have met its annual quota for homicides on one cold night in January.
Three men and a woman were shot dead in an unheated, unfurnished house on est Evergreen Avenue on the city's South Side on Monday night. With a population of less than 80,000, Youngstown has already reached the FBI's statistical murder rate of about 5.5 people per 100,000.
That's not exactly a fair statistical analysis, since urban homicide rates are about three times those for rural areas nationwide, but it demonstrates such a dramatic difference between the city and the rest of the nation at large that it cannot be ignored.
Four deaths in January also put Youngstown well on the way to meeting or exceeding its homicide figure for 2006, when the city had 32 homicides, which is nearly eight times the national average. At this rate, the city could equal Gary, Ind., which had 50 homicides per 100,000 and could double Cincinnati, which had 25 per 100,000.
If some of these statistics sound familiar, it is because they were cited just a month ago, when this page discussed the 2006 homicide rate in the city.
At that time we said:
The city's extraordinarily high homicide rate implies that there is a subculture of (primarily) men -- from late teens to 30-somethings -- who are armed and dangerous. They have weapons and they have no compunction about using them.
They've come from broken homes, attended broken schools, grown up without role models and are now on the streets, making their own rules.
We also suggested that the city's black community should be particularly alarmed because 90 percent of the victims and 90 percent of the perpetrators were black. All four victims Monday were black; police are working on a theory that the murders are linked to a long running feud of unknown origin that has erupted in gun violence in the past.
The human toll
Family and friends of Anthony Mark Crockett, 23; Christopher D. Howard, 24; Marvin Boone, 19, and Danielle Parker, 22, did not see them as statistics. They saw them as sons or daughter, brothers or sister, fathers or mother. And, of course, they were all victims who died at the hands of a brutal murderer or murderers.
But they are also tragic symbols of a city that continues to descend into a netherworld in which poverty, ignorance and violence reign.
It is no accident that Gary, Ind., another once great industrial city, is one of the few places on earth where more people die of homicide than Youngstown. There is an established link between urban poverty and higher homicide rates, which is not to say that poverty is an excuse for murder. Hundreds of millions of people live in poverty far more extreme than the average Youngstowner and do so without killing each other at the rates seen in the city.
In the short run, Mayor Jay Williams' announcement that police will pursue a zero-tolerance policy designed to get criminals off the street has the potential to reduce violence. It has worked before.
But in the long run, unless Youngstown wants to join a race toward the bottom with Gary, Camden, N.J., and other cities mired in poverty, there's going to have to be a revitalization of the city's economy and a restoration of values among those citizens who are living as if there is no tomorrow.