Last Monday, the FBI released it’s 2016 Crime in the United States report, a publication of the FBI’s Uniform Crime Reporting Program, or UCR. The UCR is a voluntary statistical compilation of offense, arrest, and police employee data reported by law enforcement agencies. The federal program began in the 1930, and has collected data ever since.

The 2016 report paints a grim picture for both the nation and closer to home here in Louisville. While much of what was contained in the report pertaining to violence in Louisville we already knew, the scope of Louisville’s problem when compared to other cities was not.

There were 1,367 more murders in the United States in 2016 than in 2015. Louisville is one of the just 8 cities responsible for more than 43% of that increase. Chicago, Memphis, San Antonio, *Orlando, Louisville, Dallas, Phoenix, and Las Vegas make up 593 of those murders.

Additionally, Louisville, while only 15% of the state’s total population, accounted for 46% of the state’s murders in 2016. By contrast, the murder rate for the rest of the state increased slightly from 3.68 to 3.75 per 100,000 residents – due to an increase of 3 murders.

Overall, Kentucky’s murder rate jumped from 4.7 per 100,000 residents in 2015 to 5.9 per 100,000 in 2016. That’s above national average – 5.3 per 100,000 residents – for just the second time since 1997.

Take a deeper dive into the number HERE, with a short analysis we did of the 2016 UCR.

*Orlando’s numbers are skewed by the Pulse Nightclub shooting that killed 49 people on June 12th 2016. Absent that mass shooting, Orlando only had 3 more murders in 2016 than it did in 2015.