Baltimore led nation last year in homicide increase

Baltimore had the highest increase in homicides in the nation last year, a criminologist commissioned by the U.S. Department of Justice reported, with more than twice as many extra killings as the three cities that tied for second.

The city suffered 127 more homicides in 2015 than in the previous year, Richard Rosenfeld wrote in "Documenting and Explaining the 2015 Homicide Rise: Research Directions," released this month by the Justice Department.

Chicago, Houston and Milwaukee came in second with 61 more killings. Cleveland and Washington had 57 more.

Rosenfeld, a professor of criminology at the University of Missouri-St. Louis, evaluated data from 56 U.S. cities and found that the most dramatic increases in homicides from 2014 to 2015 occurred in cities with more than 1 million people, with high poverty rates and large populations of African-Americans.

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