Can we predict the District of Columbia's homicide rate for 2015 by looking at the homicide count of other cities and comparing them to this time in 2014?
Nearing the end of August, Washington D.C.'s homicide count had already surpassed its record for 2014. Can we attribute this to specific local factors, or an unrest occurring nationally?
I will use data from police deparments of a small variety of highly populated cities, as well as census data targeting social factors such as average income by zip-code, concentration of post-high school degrees by area, and average age range per zip code.
I knoe that Washington D.C. has already surpassed it's homicide count of 2014 for this year. I don't know much more beyond that.
I chose this topic because the rise in murders this year in D.C. has been alarming, but I recently discovered that D.C. isn't the only city to have surpassed their previous year's homicide count this year. I personally feel that the unrest going on in other parts of the country have been motivated by reasons such as polic brutality, or a poor local economy, but I don't see these issues to the same extreme in D.C. I want to find out if there is a built up anxiety in the U.S. that causes crime to occur in waves, if external factors are playing a part in the rise in murders in D.C. or if local events and occurences can be suggested at the reason for a rise in local crime.