What is "The Murder Book?"
On December 31, 2007, I had an idea. It came from reading the the local reports in the New York newspapers that heralded 2007 as a great year for murders (if there is such a thing and apparently, there is.) Basically, that means fewer than 500 people were killed in NYC in 2007, the lowest total since reliable records were kept, that being the year 1963. That's a lot of murders but I remember the year 1990, the middle of the crack epidemic, when NYC recorded more than 2,200 murders. So we have come a long way in a very short time.
But 500 souls is still a lot. I began to wonder how many of those murders made it into the city's newspapers. All 500 (or whatever the final number turns out to be)? Or were far fewer recorded because dozens/hundreds of murders were deemed not fit to print? Were those that didn't make the cut deemed just too uninteresting? I was inspired by The Homicide Blog at the L.A. Times which last year attempted to tally up every murder in Los Angeles.
This being the beginning of the year, I thought it would be fascinating to record all the murders that appear in print in the city's three daily newspapers (The New York Times, the NY Daily News and the NY Post) in the year 2008. Not all the murders that occur, mind you, just the ones considered newsworthy (and how newsworthy) by New York's various newspaper editors. Basically, it's all the murders deemed fit to print.
I decided to call it "The Murder Book" because that's what homicide detectives call the information they compile on each of their cases. Witnesses, evidence, leads -- it all winds up in the Murder Book. Will the murders that make the grade do so because of socio-economic status, race, location, brutality, or what? By the end of the year, we'll see how many made the newspapers versus how many murders were in the police statistics. Morbid? Yes but then I am a former reporter for the NY Daily News, a writer of true crime books and a current producer for the CBS Newsmagazine "48 Hours Mystery."
It should be an interesting ride.
I will run a monthly "tab" to see what we've learned from each previous month (If you want to see the numbers of murders and what happened in January, for instance, just click on the page in the sidebar that read "The January Report" and so on for each month.) I'm also including a "category cloud" in the sidebar so if you want to see all the murders that occurred in the year so far in Queens, for instance, all you have to do is click on "Queens murders." Also included are the race/ethnicty of the victims and whether they were shot, stabbed or stangled. The bigger the word in that cloud, the more people fall into that category. All comments are welcome.
Paul LaRosa
