156 people (and climbing) murdered in the City of Birmingham in 2024

December 18, 2024 – BIRMINGHAM, AL - On Saturday, Randolph Taylor Jr, age 48, was shot to death during an argument with another man on the West End Walking Trail in West End. Jhontaye Dior Cobb was arrested and charged with capital murder in the case. Most of the deaths are from gunplay. At least 139 of the killings were with guns. Gun violence has just become engrained as part of the culture.

Sadly, the newsworthy part of this is not that a murder occurred in Alabama or even in the City of Birmingham, but that it has become so commonplace. Over 450 people have been murdered in the city of Birmingham in the last three years alone. Birmingham has a long sordid history of violence; but the 2020s have been bad years by anybody's standards. With Christmas and the New Year's holidays still approaching Birmingham has set a new morbid record with 156 homicides having been committed through Sunday.

The mark breaks the all-time record of 153 set in 2022. 2023 wasn't much better with 151 murders. And the year is not over yet. There were six murders that occurred last year in the last two weeks of the year. If Christmas 2024 is as bad as Christmas 2023 was this year's total could rise well into the 160s. It even surpasses a record set in 1933 when the population of Birmingham was far higher. Alternatively, some use 148 in 1933 as the record for Birmingham using a different method of analysis. If you factor in the advances in trauma surgery and treatment 2024 if far more violent than 1933 was (when the city had a larger population than it does now); because a large number of gunshot victims today would not have survived with 1933 levels of medical care.

"I think it is important as the media runs its stories around numbers tying it to all-time, tying highs, tying it to 1933 that we remember that these are victims who had lives," said Birmingham Mayor Randall Woodfin. "It has always been violent here. What is happening in Birmingham is not new for our city. Violent crime has always been a rate that is too high. Whether it was lynchings, whether it was bombings, and now in our case in 2024 what you see before you – gun violence."

Woodfin saw his older sister, Cindy, shot in front of their North Birmingham house. His brother was shot and killed when Randall was just 12.

Everyone has guns and when people have disputes they settle them with guns. 12 of the killings have been ruled as self-defense by authorities. Two of Woodfin's cousins were among those murdered this year.

"America as a culture, as a society, we celebrate violence," said Woodfin. "Violence courses through our culture."

The Alabama Gazette, and other news outlets, generally don't even report on Birmingham shootings or we would have a new story on it every other day. Alabama has the third highest murder rate in the country at 14.2 murders per 100,000 residents (Mississippi and Louisiana being the two worst) – with Birmingham being the epicenter of the violence in the state. Birmingham had a 2023 population of 196,644. 156 murders in a year would represent a murder rate of 79.3 per 100,000 and if you narrowed that down to Black men that number would be well in excess of 140 per 100,000 and in most cases (where we know who the perpetrator is) the perpetrator is another Black man. 133 of the victims have been male and 23 have been females.

246 people were murdered in the entire state of Alabama in 2014. Since then the violence has skyrocketed. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in the most recent year where we have numbers (2023) 706 Alabamians were murdered. That represents a 287 percent increase in less than a decade.

"In this American epidemic of gun violence right now Birmingham has seen the worst of it," said Woodfin. "I think about my cousin who lost her two children. I think of the other victims."

The situation in Birmingham is so bad, that at one point in the Summer, State Representative Juandalynn Givan (D-Birmingham), whose district has been especially hard hit by all the violence, publicly called for the Governor to send in the National Guard.

https://www.bhamwiki.com/w/2024_Birmingham_homicides

https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/pressroom/sosmap/homicide_mortality/homicide.htm

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