The Year in Homidices – Written and compiled by Edward Ericson Jr., Kenneth Stone Breckenridge,  Rebekah Kirkman, and Brandon Soderberg – The following was written by Karen Houppert, City Paper editor:  “People are killing people in the streets of Baltimore, nearly every day. In 2015, there were 344 homicides—most of them young black men. If you are a young black man in Baltimore, you are 30 times more likely to die on the streets here than if you had grown up elsewhere in the U.S. (The murder rate in the U.S. nationally is five out of 100,000; the murder rate within the black male population of Baltimore is about 156 per 100,000.)…We are a divided city—by race and class yes, absolutely, but also divided between those who see the victims of violence as “the other” and those who see them as “us.” Too many residents simply avert their eyes, rather than rolling up their sleeves to dive in and address any one of the aforementioned problems contributing to the violence. I say this, and yet there is this other part of Baltimore, the many residents who have been working for decades to address the homicide rate and the overlapping issues mentioned above, volunteers and neighborhood organizations and foundations trying to tackle this problem on a shoestring, limping along with limited resources and a skeletal staff. (We include a partial, admittedly incomplete list of some of those organizations at the end of this page in case readers wish to get involved.) These are the people who understand in a profound way there is no “other,” there is only “us.” They are also the people who understand that Baltimore City is at a crisis point. And yet, how to convey that clearly, visually, irrefutably so that all of Baltimore sees? The editorial staff at City Paper looked to the Vietnam Memorial for inspiration this week for the following reasons: Because almost every day the police department announces the latest homicide, because every week the paper runs the death tally in Murder Ink, because there were more homicides this year than in the previous 22, because the numbers keep rising, because each single homicide is the story of a life with a ripple effect on a family and neighborhood, because we wish we could do a proper obituary for each person killed but lack the editorial resources, because we wish to acknowledge each death, because we are hopeful that cumulative murders and the visual impact of sheer numbers and names will move readers to action, because we have faith in this city and its ability to do so much better than it does, because we hope people will be shocked out of their complacency, because something has to change, we have dedicated this entire issue to a list of the 344 murders in Baltimore this year. There will be no arts coverage, no columns, no photos…”