An interactive report published on Wednesday by The Washington Post brings to light a dark fact about crime and violence in the city of Miami. The newspaper’s analysis of public records data shows that 60 percent of homicides in the city between 2007 and 2017 went unsolved, placing Miami towards the bottom of the 50 cities it analyzed.
Only Baltimore, Buffalo, New Orleans, Chicago and San Bernardino were worse at solving homicides than Miami, according to the report.
The results vary depending on where in the city crimes happen. Nearly all homicides were solved in a particular part of Little Havana. But there are pockets of the Liberty City, Alapattah and Little River neighborhoods where less than a third of murders were solved. Those areas also saw many more homicides than other parts of the city.
Residents of those communities have been vocal about addressing gun violence through policy change. Students at Miami Northwestern High School even organized a walk-out of classes to bring attention to the gun violence in their community in the days following the February school shooting that left 17 dead in Parkland.
"The students are charged to respond to what has not been happening, and from what I can tell you, the students are galvanizing to articulate how they feel," Northwestern teacher Miriam King told WLRN's Nadege Green during the walk-out.
There were racial and ethnic disparities in terms of which kinds of murders got solved, according to the Post's analysis. Police made arrests for nearly half of homicides that had a white victim, compared to about 30 percent for cases where the victims were black or Latino.
The Miami Police Department did not respond to a request for comment about the findings.
The Post used data gathered by local police departments and an FBI database in order to analyze the numbers.
