Del.: How Wilmington Became ‘Murdertown’
Since 2008, there have been 1,111 people shot and 254 people killed in the city of Wilmington, Delaware. Such figures have given Wilmington a reputation for escalating gun violence ever as homicide rates decline nationwide.
From the Outline:
The violence in Wilmington has received national attention at various points over the last few years, such as a Newsweek feature that billed the city as “Murdertown, USA” and a segment on NPR’s All Things Considered, both in 2014. But things have continued to get worse; the News Journal/USA Todayand the Associated Press reported last year that Wilmington was the most dangerous place for 12 to 17 year olds in the country, with a rate of 3.4 kids injured or killed per 1,000 from 2014 to mid 2017— a rate nearly twice as high as Chicago’s, which had the second-highest rate on the list, and more than double that of the similarly sized Trenton, NJ, which had the fourth-highest.
In 2013, the city, led by Councilwoman Hanifa Shabazz, asked the Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) to study local gun violence as a public health crisis. It is, to date, the only time that the CDC has studied gun violence in this way in an American city, due to decades-old, politically motivated restrictions on studying gun violence.
