Boston's Violent Summer

It appears that Boston suffered its 11th homicide of August yesterday. This follows a 10-homicide July, making this only the second time Boston has had back-to-back double-digit murder counts since the 'Boston miracle' of the mid-1990s. It also happened in June-July 2006; that year, the city tallied 74 homicides for the year, after 75 in 2005, and everyone agreed the city was in a crisis. The annual numbers dropped to 66, then 60, and finally 50 in 2009, before spiking back up to 72 last year. (This is all according to my records, which primarily come from the BPD.)

This year started off very low on homicides (possibly due to the worse-than-usual winter). Since then, it's been bad -- but there hasn't been much focus on how bad, because the year-to-date numbers were still low. But it's bad: the 35 murders from May through August are, according to my records, the worst for that four-month period since the pre-miracle days.