Nobody really wants to win this thing. Only one number turned over in the entire month of April with just a single traffic fatality in the region and Springfield recording yet another month without a homicide.
The trend extrapolation, as city lover Chris Martenson might say it, would show Springfield with a nearly 70% drop in homicides. I wouldn’t expect the trend to continue, I would expect the year over year pattern to more or less resume with the city probably ending the year somewhere around double digits, though I’d love to be wrong. Needless to say, if the numbers were reversed and the city were on track for a 70% increase in homicides I would expect to see it plastered all over the media. Unfortunately, in reality world this is mostly a non story.
I get it. Writing about who didn’t murder whom doesn’t give a reporter much to dig into.
What has been astounding to me has been the massive number of horrific crashes in which no one dies. April was not short at all on “jaws of life extrications”, just on deaths. If I had the resources and/or the media were able to generate accurate data consistently, I would love to produce a crash versus gunshot tally with some sort of corresponding injury scale; perhaps a reverse util. Those numbers would be way more impressive than the 10 to 1 ratio car related deaths have on homicides as the scoreboard stands right now to close out the month of April.