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El Paso has seen 14 murders in the first six months of this, year compared to just one in the same period last year. Sexual assaults are also up sharply.

That raises two questions: Could the sharp increase in homicide and rape knock the city out as the nation's safest big city, and is El Paso suddenly becoming more violent?

The answer to the first is, almost assuredly, no. For the answer to the second, El Paso will have to wait and see.

But this year's crime stats will not affect the CQ Press' new safest-city rankings when they come out in November.

That's because those rankings will be based on violent crime statistics from last year. And in 2010, there were just five murders in El Paso.

The last time the city experienced so few murders was more than 40 years ago, in 1964, when El Paso's population was half of last year's figure of 624,000.

Even in 1964, five murders was unusually low. There were twice as many the year before, in 1963.

When CQ Press announced its 2010 rankings last November, its analysis was actually based on the FBI's Uniform Crime Report for 2009, when there were 12 murders in El Paso.

This year's crime figures won't be counted in CQ's ratings until November 2012. And while murders are up 1,400 percent and rapes up 36 percent for the first six months of this year, other violent crimes are down.

"Everybody's comparing to last year," said Lt. Al Lowe, who has been head of the El Paso Police Department's Crimes Against Persons Unit since 2004. "Last year was an anomaly. It's hard to compare to last year."

He said six of this year's 14 murders involved domestic violence, and four occurred in the commission of other crimes, including a home burglary on Pratt Street in which a mother and daughter were killed.

Two killings were gang and drug related. Two others involved a pair of incidents in which two men drinking started together and wound up in fights that left one of them dead.

Lowe said gang and drug violence does not appear to be on the rise, but there continue to be fights over drugs in which one group tries to "rip off" another.

"These ‘rips' between young people are just about how they want to order the drugs, but don't want to pay for them," he said. "It's become this trend among young people to rip each other off. One way or the other, somebody gets killed.

"These rips have always been there. I don't see an increase."

Question of spillover
Since the start of the bloody turf fight between the Juárez and Sinaloa drug cartels in Cuidad Juárez in 2008, the big question has been whether El Paso is seeing spillover violence.

The answer from law enforcement agencies has always been an emphatic "no." But the next question is whether the brutal killings across the border may be infecting the attitudes of gang members in El Paso.

"Possibly there has been a spillover on assaults," Lowe said. "To me, it's mirroring the assaults from the 1990s."

Between 1990 and 1995, gang fights and drive-by shootings were routinely in the news and accounted for many of the city's 274 killings during those five years, peaking with 56 murders in 1993.

"That was something we used to discuss when we were going into the schools, and we were doing all the anti-drug programs," Lowe said. "From a distance, what they see is money. But, when you get close, you see bullet-holes in the side of a car, a jail sentence and a short life.

"Those presentations seemed to sway people. Is that life impressing to some of the younger people today? We addressed it once, and we're going to have to address it again."

For a full discussion of violent crime in El Paso, see El Paso Inc.'s interview with Lowe starting on page 18.

No. 1 wonder
El Paso's new place as the safest American city with a population over 500,000 is both a point of pride to El Pasoans and wonder to criminologists and sociologists. They have a hard time explaining how a poor city with high unemployment next door to the world's most dangerous city could possibly be so peaceful.

That fact didn't keep one Texas congressman from expressing the conventional wisdom about spillover violence from the Mexican cartel wars.

"Of course there is spillover violence along the border," Rep. Michael McCaul, a Republican whose district stretches from Austin to Houston, told USA Today. "It is not secure and it has never been more violent or dangerous than it is today.

"Anyone who lives down there will tell you that."

But in a 2009 article in Reason Magazine headlined "The El Paso Miracle," a Northeastern University criminologist, Jack Levin, may have put his finger on one aspect of the miracle.

"If you want to find a safe city, first determine the size of the immigrant population," he said. "If the immigrant community represents a large proportion of the population, you're likely to be in one of the country's safer cities.

"San Diego, Laredo, El Paso - these cities are teeming with immigrants, and they're some of the safest places in the country."

El Paso's rise to the top wasn't sudden. The city went back and forth between the second- and third-safest city starting in 2002 before reaching No. 1 last year.

CQ Press' rankings ratings are based on the FBI's Uniform Crime Reports, an annual compilation of eight major crimes: murder, rape, robbery, aggravated assault, burglary vehicle theft, theft and arson. CQ tosses out theft and arson and analyzes the rest.

A subsidiary of Sage Publications, the Washington D.C.-based CQ Press has been putting out its annual City Crime Rankings report since 2007, when it acquired Morgan Quitno Press.

Morgan Quitno first published its "Safest (and Most Dangerous) Cities" report in 1994.

Taking the heat
Both publishers took heat for listing cities as "safest" and "most dangerous." The protests reached a crescendo in 2007 when the FBI, the U.S. Conference of Mayors and the American Society of Criminology formally objected.

The complaints didn't come from cities at the top of the "safe" list, but from those at the bottom.

The Society of Criminologists called the rankings "an irresponsible misuse of the data and do groundless harm to many communities."

Caught by surprise by the criticism the first year it put out the report, CQ Press changed the name to "City Crime Ratings" in 2008 and carried on.

"A lot of it comes down to folks saying it's UCR data reported by local jurisdictions and there might be discrepancies in how they report crimes," said CQ Press spokesman, Ben Krasney. "Our take is this is the only and the best national data set for national crime stats.

"It's approved and published by the FBI, and what we publish in our reference books helps make sense of what is out there."

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