It's time we put statistics into context. This is the only way we can sharpen our focus on next steps to reduce violence and increase public safety. End-of-year totals are convenient figures for politicians and the media, but they do not tell the whole story. When thinking about crime, both time and history matter.

A report I recently completed at Yale's Institute for Social and Policy Studies analyzed 48 years of crime data in Chicago to put some of these crime figures into context. When looking at nearly five decades of data, four important trends are worth noting:

First, far from being the most violent city in the U.S., Chicago falls roughly in the middle of the nation in violence and murder rates. Figure 1 shows the violent crime rate of all U.S. cities with populations of 250,000 residents or more. Chicago, this figure clearly shows, is not the most violent city in the country. Rather Chicago's rate of violent crime is almost half that of cities like Detroit, Oakland, and St. Louis.

Figure 1 – Top 30 Violent Crime Rates Across Major Metropolitan Areas with population of 250,000 or more residents (2012)