Comparing Milwaukee Homicide Data to Other Cities

On September 5, students from Wauwatosa East High School walked out of their classes and took to the sidewalks to demand strict gun laws. This event was coordinated with national groups across the nation in the face of the unprecedented incidents in schools and on the streets.

How does Milwaukee fit into this trend, when it comes to homicides and fatal and non-fatal shootings? The numbers have gone up and down, as the graph below shows. The purple columns represent the number of nonfatal shootings in Milwaukee each year, the gray columns the number of gun homicides, and the yellow columns the number of homicides using an instrument other than a firearm.

Although the causes of the variation in shootings and other homicides remain unclear, one thing is clear from this chart: firearms are the instrument of choice when it comes to murder. An overwhelming number of homicides in Milwaukee use a gun.

The data for this chart stems from two sources: a dashboard from the Milwaukee Homicide Review Commission hosted by the Medical College of Wisconsin and the Milwaukee Police Department Dashboard. Although both use data from the police department, their numbers sometimes differ slightly, likely due to not consistently updating the data when the status of an event changes, such as when a victim dies.

One other difference between the two dashboards is that the MPD does not distinguish between homicides using a firearm and those using something else. In such cases I subtracted the Homicide Review Commission non-firearm homicide number from the department’s total homicide number.

Starting in 2020, the number of shootings, both fatal and nonfatal, in Milwaukee jumped, peaking in 2022, and then declining at least until last year. Other cities saw a similar pattern. From the timing it seems likely the COVID-19 pandemic was linked to this jump in shootings, as reporting nationally has suggested.

One question is how long the decline in shootings is likely to continue. Year-to-date data, shown in the next graph, give a mixed message. Between 2023 and 2025, nonfatal shootings went down by 39%. By contrast, homicides declined by only 12%. Put another way, shootings became substantially more deadly.

Did other cities show a similar pattern? A website called Real Time Crime Index has been collecting data from police departments around the nation. The next graph compares the Milwaukee homicide rate from the MPD dashboard to that from the crime index. Although the site does not list Milwaukee among its partnership police departments, there does seem to be overall agreement as shown below.

The Real Time Crime Index can be used to get an impression of whether fluctuations in homicides rates are unique to local factors versus the national economy. For example, the next graph compares Milwaukee’s homicide rate since January 2018 (shown in orange and using the scale on the right) to the average of all cities with populations between 250,000 and 1 million (using purple and the scale on the left). For consistency, both used data from the Real Time Crime Index. The evidence points to the conclusion that something—presumably Covid—caused a jump in homicides starting around 2020.

The next graph compares Milwaukee’s rate of homicide to that of four other cities: Washington, Chicago, Baltimore, and New Orleans. These were chosen because all four are among the cities that Trump has threatened to take over while citing the level of crime.

All five cities have seen their homicide rates decline sine 2022 and converge to somewhere between 20 and 30 per resident. To make the results comparable I divided each city’s rate by its population.

To me, the most intriguing of these cities is Baltimore. For years, it was regarded as dysfunctional and dangerous. It is no accident that the writers of the HBO series “The Wire” chose to place it in Baltimore. But its homicide rate has been cut in half since 2022.

Understanding the factors behind changes in homicide rates is one of the most important—and difficult—research issues around. Correlation does not prove causation.

In Milwaukee the police attribute over a third of the homicides to “argument/fight.” But the more pressing question is limiting access to guns, or at least to high-powered and high-capacity magazines. How can the culture be changed so that people can safely disagree without the introduction of a firearm?

In examining the data on guns and gun deaths in Milwaukee and elsewhere, one is struck by several things. One is how localized they are. Milwaukee has 15 aldermanic districts, each with about the same number of residents. Four of those districts, with just 27% of Milwaukee’s population, accounted for 55% of the city’s homicides and 61% of its nonfatal shootings.

For years, the gun lobby has argued that carrying a gun makes one safer. The evidence seems to point in the opposite direction. When one or both members to a dispute have guns, the dispute is more likely to turn lethal. The lethality in these four districts of Milwaukee is likely to feed on itself. In the belief that having a gun offers safety in a dangerous neighborhood, its residents are more likely to be armed than people living in safer places.

Shootings in schools seem to arise not only from arguments but from mental health issues. In an ideal world those mental health issues would be addressed, but in the meantime, there is a simpler solution: as the Wauwatosa high school students noted, limiting the availability of guns would reduce the number of deaths.