Archibald: Birmingham's future, if there is one, as told by its saddest statistics (2025)

This is an opinion column.

The numbers are staggering, really. Death and loss and an inability to deal with it. Now we’re looking at setting more bloody records.

Birmingham lost 43,532 people -- 18 percent of its population, between 2003 and 2023. It’s like a city the size of Florence just up and moved away.

Or died. Too many died. In too many ways.

More than 2,000 people were murdered in those two decades. More than 100 a year, on average. It is numbing, until it happens to somebody you care about.

I hate to talk of those who died as if they are numbers. They are not. They are moms and dads and sons and daughters and good people and troubled people and people who won’t have a chance to ever prove who they really are. But sometimes I have to add them up, if only to see how overwhelmingly tragic it is.

More than 3,500 people have been killed in the city alone since I started work in Birmingham in 1988. That’s more than the 2,977 who died on 9/11. More than the 2,459 Americans who died over two decades of war in Afghanistan.

It hasn’t slowed down. As of Monday, 99 people had been killed by homicide in Birmingham this year. The city is on pace to see about 160 killings. That’s well over the 1933 record of 148. And the city is smaller than it has been in a century.

There have always been troublesome eras. Like the early ‘90s. Or the early ‘30s. Or the William Howard Taft administration. But our problems are not isolated to the city limits of Birmingham.

Homicides across all of Jefferson County rose 50% between 2003 and last year.

Jay Glass is now retired, but for decades he was chief deputy coroner in Jefferson County. He used to point to the “Wild West” of Birmingham’s early 20th century days as a way to give perspective to our violence. It’s not that things aren’t as bad as they seem. Just that things aren’t as bad as they once were.

Back in 1911 the city and county combined for 156 homicides, he said and wrote. In a county with a population of just 226,000 at the time, the per capita homicide rate came to an eye-popping 69 per hundred thousand people. That was more than double the rate in the otherwise record-setting year of 1991, when Birmingham and Jefferson County together posted 193 homicides.

But alas, that is less reassuring today. The city on its own for the first time broke that per capita mark in 2022, when 73 people died for every 100,000 residents. And the city edged close to that 1933 total two years ago, just four homicides short. But it is likely both records will fall this year, the homicide total and the rate.

We have always been violent in this beautiful, blessed place, though the sprays of bullets have seemed extraordinarily wanton of late. There is more firepower, and matching disregard for consequence and collateral damage. But our problems are not just homicides

Deaths determined to be accidents by the Jefferson County coroner’s office rose 183%, from 241 in 2003 to 682 last year. And stop before you assume that’s because of mistimed traffic lights or cars falling into potholes. The vast majority of those accidents – 73% last year, split almost evenly between black and white people – came in the form of overdoses.

The numbers took off more than a decade ago, perhaps because nobody – city, county, state and feds alike – knew how to deal with a raging opioid epidemic.

Current Jefferson County Chief Deputy Coroner Bill Yates said the increase began in 2012 with what he called “a switchover” from the abuse of prescription opiates to illicit use of street heroin and other drugs.

It seems doctors became afraid to prescribe opiates, whether by conscience or law, so addicted patients went looking for replacements on the streets. Heroin and fentanyl found them, with deadly consequences.

“If you look at the total number of deaths, that’s where the big increase is coming from,” Yates said. “We started seeing a rise in homicides during that same time.”

I can’t help but believe we are doing things wrong. Again and again and again.

The whole country has tried to stomp out dangerous drugs by interfering with medical treatment, by jailing doctors and herding users to back alley pharmacies. Alabama has certainly tried to assure us we are safe if we are better armed than our criminals, but it sure seems like that just puts more fingers on triggers. We tell ourselves we are tough on crime, but often, as history shows, the toughness convinces a lot of people that they have no place in the justice system. So they seek their own justice in the streets.

The truth is hard. Crime is most devastating of course, no matter where you are, to the families of those involved, to the communities where people feel unsafe. But it also impairs our ability as a city or county or state or region to promise safe streets and schools to all, to convince businesses that this place is not as bad as they think. Or even as bad as it once was.

The truth is – the statistics bear it out – we are happier, safer and less violent when we are prosperous.

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And you simply can’t punish people into prosperity.

John Archibald is a two-time Pulitzer winner for AL.com.

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Archibald: Birmingham's future, if there is one, as told by its saddest statistics (2025)
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