Murders should be falling annually due to improved medical care (ambulances are basically rolling emergency rooms these days). And we now live in a surveillance society, so we ought to at least be getting the benefits in reduced murder rates.
For example, the increasingly widely deployed ShotSpotter system for locating gunfire via audio triangulation originated in work begun by Silicon Valley seismologist John C. Lahr in 1992 in response to East Palo Alto becoming the murder capital of America with 42 homicides in a population of only about 24,000.
In 2017, however, East Palo Alto suffered only one murder. Some of that is due to all the surveillance tech now scanning the streets. But much of the difference stems from Hispanics driving blacks out of East Palo Alto. The black share of the population fell from 61 percent in the 1980 Census to 17 percent in 2010.
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In sharp contrast to heavily black cities, towns near the Mexican border were exceptionally murder-free in 2017, such as San Diego (2.4), Tucson (3.2), and El Paso (2.8).
El Paso has been famous for its calm citizenry for generations. A 1971 article in Time, “The Texas Tranquilizer,” attributed the low murder rate in El Paso to the high levels of lithium in its well water.
