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Show Murder Is Done by Tick of Clock One Dies Every 42 Minutes As Blade of Death Sweeps Nation. America's munlers are on a 2-1-hour schedule. The minute hand of i)ie nation's crime clock Is a blade of death, slicing off another liumon life every 42 minutes, adding the figure Hf Vneh day to our ever mounting mount-ing homicide rate. For despite G-men, radio scout i-ars and lie detectors, the quaint American custom of large scale kill-In kill-In has become deep rooted, especially espe-cially In the South. As against the 13 northern American Amer-ican cities having no deaths from homicide last year, 12 of the 13 with the highest homicide rate were south of the Mason-Dixon line. The one exception, East St. Louis, is northern only geographically, its people being predominantly southern. Murder will out, statistically, each July as experts complete a survey over the preceding year's homicide records. The current report shows that approximately 3o people are killed each day by their fellow men. It shows Lansing to be one of the 13 cities without homicide In 1034, and Grand Rapids to be one of the 10 cities with the lowest homicide homi-cide records. Center of all-around plain and fancy killing, however, is Macon, Ga., which received the all-Amerlcan rating rat-ing of G6.7 on a 103-1 rating of 3G homicides among 54,150 people, or an average of three killings a month. Proportionately, nearly seven times ns many persons in Macon are done to death by shooting, stabbing, choking chok-ing or poisoning than the average for the country at large. It's not much safer in Memphis, cither, where a rate of 56.5 per 100,-000 100,-000 leads Atlanta with 52.3; Birmingham Birming-ham with 50.2; Jacksonville, 49.G ; .Montgomery, 49.2; Nashville, 48.0; I'etersburg, Va., 47.3; Augusta, Ga., 15.7 ; Lexington, Ky., 42.1 ; Savannah, Savan-nah, 40.S; Mobile, 37.9; Little Rock, 37.0; East St. Louis, 33.5, and Charleston, 31.7. But by way of outstanding contrast, con-trast, consider Brockton, Cambridge, Cam-bridge, Gloucester, Haverhill, flol-poke flol-poke and Qulncy, Mass., as well as East Orange and Lakewood and Ho-boken, Ho-boken, N. J.; Newport, R. 1.; Lincoln. Neb., and Lansing, which had no killings at all. Statistics based on 169 representative representa-tive cities show that Grand Rapids follows with the low rate of 0.G on its homicides, tying Jersey City and preceding Providence with 0.8; New Bedford, 0.9; Somervllle, 0.9; Lowell 1.0; Lynn, 1.0; Waterbury, 1.0; Al-toona, Al-toona, 1.1, and Berkeley, 1.1. For the five largest American cities, Chicago retains its preeminence preem-inence in homicides, producing a rate 3t 14.2 per 100,000 in 1933 and 13.3 In 1934. Philadelphia follows with l.S, Detroit De-troit with 1.8, Los Angeles with 1.4. and New York with 1.3. Detroit Free Press. |