Throughout 2009, with the homicide rate largely unchanged but shootings way down, I heard a lot of people - both police officers and readers - joking that the criminal element must be better shots. So I decided to see if there was any data that might actually explain this phenomenon.
As it turned out, they were right. With the number of shootings falling 40 percent and homicides down 9 percent in the past decade, Baltimore saw a rise in the number of people killed by gunshot wounds to the head. As a raw number, it rose some 68 percent from 1998, while as a percentage of total killings, headshots went from about 17 percent of the total killings in 1996 to about half of the city's total last year.
So what does this mean? In a nutshell, it means that more killings are occurring up-close and execution, reducing the chance that the victim's life can be saved. But it also indicates possible decline in street robberies and spraying of bullets, which are more likely to involved bystanders or "innocent" victims.