2006 homicide rate at 12-year high

So we're beginning 2007 with a grim statistic: The murder rate in Houston jumped 13.5 percent last year, far more than the 1.4 percent increase nationally and representing a 12-year high in the city's homicide numbers. Houston totaled 379 homicides in 2006, up from 334 in 2005 and approaching the all-time high of 419 in 1994. And according to the AP, Mayor Bill White is blaming the increase in part on Katrina evacuees: "We did have a surge in population from a city where the homicide rate is eight times the national average," White said.

White isn't placing all the blame on evacuees, and he shouldn't, Rice University's Bob Stein said. Rising crime rates come with increases in population, and Houston just happened to gain 100,000 or more new residents all at once in the fall of 2005. "A national (crime) trend we can't avoid," Stein said. "We had a population growth, and any population growth will drive up crime rates. And we had an idiosyncratic, rare event -- the Katrina evacuees." That increase helped keep the per-capita murder rate fairly even: 17.24 per 100,000 residents in 2006 compared to 16.33 per 100,000 in 2005. We suppose there's some comfort in that. Somewhere.

The good news is that, while the homicide rate was rising, the rate of other types of crime in Houston decreased last year: Robberies, rapes, aggravated assaults, burglaries, thefts and car thefts dropped between 2 percent and 9 percent in 2006, the AP reported.