Over the weekend, Baltimore City recorded it's 100th homicide of 2023.
While we work to focus on each of these individuals, understanding how each person lost impacts the families, neighbors and communities that surround them, we are also committed to digging into the data to better understand crime in our city.
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As of Monday morning on May 15, 2023, Baltimore Police had recorded 101 homicides for the year 2023. However, that includes 7 murders recorded this year, where the altercation leading to the homicide happened before 2023.
These types of incidents are indicated by an orange dot in our map below.
Sometimes, it takes time for the medical examiner to determine cause of death and sometimes the victim lives for several years after sustaining the injury that does ultimately lead to their death.
For transparency, we include them in our homicide count for the year because that's how Baltimore Police count homicides for the year. When we input the victim's information into our database, we use the age at the time of the incident, not the time of death.
Taking a look at the 101 victims as a whole and what information we've collected about them, the average age of a homicide victim is 30-years-old.
Ten of the murder victims were under the age of 18.
All but one of those victims died from incidents that happened this year. The one, was 8-year-old Dylan King, who died in late 2022.
The oldest victims were 75.
This year, we've also started tracking the racial makeup of homicide victims in the City.
At least 81% of the victims killed were Black. There are still some victims whose race hasn't been confirmed.
4.95% of the victims were white and 3.96% were Hispanic.
According to the latest data from the U.S. Census, Black Baltimoreans are over-represented in the homicide numbers.
Men are also over-represented in the homicide numbers.
92.08% of the murder victims recorded in 2023 have been male.
The US Census has the female population of Baltimore City at 52.9%.
We've also taken a look at the geography. Only including homicides from incidents this year, the Western District has seen the most, with 16.
Including previous year incidents, the Western and Northeast districts each recorded 17 homicides this year.
This is how that looks plotted out on a map:
Breaking the geography down even further, we've also taken a look at how many homicides there have been per neighborhood.
We've used the Baltimore Police Department's 'Find My District' tool to determine neighborhoods by their address, in an effort to have a consistent way to track neighborhood homicide, which may account for discrepancies with other homicide trackers.
By our count, the North Harford Road neighborhood has seen the most murders recorded this year with 6, followed by Upton and Brooklyn each with 5 and Frankford and Cherry Hill each with 4.
We've also taken a closer look at the most dangerous days and times of day.
The deadliest day of the week has been Fridays, with 16 of this years homicides (where the incident happened this year) taking place moving into the weekend.
The 8:00 hour also appears to be the deadliest so far this year.
Another area we've tracked is the weapon used in murders in Baltimore City.
In 88.12% of all the murders recorded in the City this year, a gun was used.
The next most common weapon was a knife or sharp object, in 6.93% of murders.
At this point last year, the City had already recorded 124 murders.
Last year, Baltimore hit 101 recorded homicides on April 19.
You can take a closer look at the 2022 homicide numbers and data here.