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The city of Detroit has lost roughly two-thirds of its population since around 1950, when nearly two million people lived there. Conventional wisdom says that rising crime droves Detroiters out of the city and into the suburbs, but is that really true? To find out, I plotted the city's murder rate against its population from 1950 to 2004. I also did the same for ten other cities that had lost significant population since 1950. And while there's no uniform pattern here, my data seems not to support that conventional wisdom - especially in the case of Detroit, where depopulation began more than a decade before the murder rate started climbing.
Note: A homicide rate of zero almost certainly means that the city's police department did not report its homicide rate to the FBI that year. It does not mean that there were no murders.