While searching around for homicide rates on Wikipedia I found this, which is quite interesting:

http://www.disastercenter.com/crime/uscrime.htm

It's a chart of all the crimes committed in the U.S. since 1960.

I was mainly looking at murders. The largest peak was from 1979-81. I'm guessing that's when the cocaine trade was beginning to be set up and all the gangsters were killering eachother, but it might be something else.

The other interesting peak is in 1991, the year the L.A. Riots and the end of the Gulf War.

It's also interesting, but probably not surprising, that there was a huge drop during and after 1999, the year of Columbine.

So yeah, that was an interesting waste of time. Anyone else found anything interesting at twenty to two in the morning?