By Phillip Reese, Image: Screenshot from article, California Healthline, April 11, 2022
The stunning climb in homicide rates in recent years in California and big cities across the nation obscures a remarkably good-news trend involving young children: The number of child homicide victims fell dramatically in California over the past decade, the latest death certificate data shows, a pattern mirrored to a lesser extent nationwide.
In 1991, California’s coroners officially classified 133 deaths of children ages 9 and younger as homicides. By 2011, that figure had fallen to 81.
In 2020, it stood at 40.
Adjusted for population changes, the state’s child homicide rate — the number of homicides per 100,000 children ages 0 to 9 — dropped about 50% from 2011 to 2020 and is down about 70% from three decades earlier, according to data from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the California Department of Public Health.
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