The front page of the Republic this a.m. featured this hed:


Phoenix Shootings leave 3 dead in 1st murders of ’10

The hed is accurate, but it obscures the real news in the story, which is that police expect to report that there were 130 murders in the city last year—down from 222 in 2007.

According to crime stats here, the city’s murder rate isn’t trending up or down overall. Rather, oddly, it bounces:

216 in 1999, 247 in 2003 and 234 in 2006 …

… but 152 in 2000, 183 in 2002, and 168 in 2008.

Still, given the rise in the area’s population, the drops over the last two years are solid improvements. (For 2009, the rate per 100,000 people will have dropped by half from the prevailing rate at the turn of the last decade.)