Birmingham’s Homicide Rate Joins National Decline

Jon Paepcke/NBC 13
Published: June 9, 2008
Updated: June 9, 2008

BIRMINGHAM, Ala. --- Across the nation last year, homicide detectives took on fewer new cases.

Here in Birmingham, there were 18 less than the year before.

Today's F.B.I. preliminary crime report shows the Magic City matched up pretty well against Alabama's other major cities.

In fact, Birmingham was the only large municipality which saw a murder decrease.

Mobile, Huntsville and Montgomery all experienced double digit increases.

U.A.B. Criminal Justice professor Dr. John Sloan he said while our homicide decline is promising, it's Birmingham's 12% rise in robberies which caught his eye.

“When homicides go up, typically robbery goes up. When robberies go down, typically homicide goes down. We've got a situation where we had a decline in homicides but we had an increase in robberies and that is a little bit unusual,” Dr. John Sloan stated.

Sloan said a more in depth study of Birmingham crime data is necessary to explain why 2007 bucked that robbery-homicide trend.

Either way, compared to the triple digit homicide totals of 2005 and 2006, last year's numbers are giving Sloan hope.

“For about the last four years or so we had this real spike in homicides and it got really bad here so that decline in '07 is welcome news,” Sloan concluded.

That's not something Birmingham homicide detectives often hear.