Houston had periodic runs as murder capital of America going back to the 1940s or maybe earlier....There was a great headline circa 1950: WHY IS HOUSTON SO KILL-CRAZY?
There were a couple of years where it reigned as murder capital of America in the '70s too and I can tell you from experience, going to HS in SW Houston and living deep inside the loop in the Oil Bust (1984-88) years was pretty fucked up. Weirdly, not quite as bad as when the economy was roaring along, but pretty bad. The Geto Boys were not created in a vacuum.
Criminologists used to explain Houston's high rate in boom times as basically the same reason it's always high under such conditions. You have a bunch of people with limited educations pouring into town to work blue collar jobs and they lose their connections to their friends and families back in the Piney Woods or Detroit or wherever. So they are isolated with maybe their nuclear family and living in some thrown together collection of shacks like Aldine or Galena Park or Cloverleaf. Alcoholism and drug problems flourish when community breaks down. So does domestic violence. And then you had all these dudes down at the beer joints settling debts of redneck honor out in the parking lot. Lots and lots of bodies dropped over pussy. The old fashioned system of courtin' was gone and everybody was out in meat markets....Sometimes in ways you might not enjoy: Johnny Bush, composer of Whiskey River, said he was playing at a Ship Channel joint (Harbor Lights, still exists, barely) and a cook came running out of the kitchen and buried a meat cleaver in a waiter's head. Waiter had been fucking the cook's wife.....I am betting the cook got 3-5 if that.
And that was just the White people.
You also had Fifth Ward as America's most violent neighborhood and some hardcore cholos in El Segundo (Second Ward) already by then. So that's one way you get a terrible murder rate: you essentially have Deadwood, sociologically. It takes decades for churches and schools to tame that shit, if they ever do.
Oil Bust was kinda more standard-issue poverty and drugs -- crack, mainly. The 1980s were the only decade Houston has ever lost population -- not during the Civil War or the Depression. So that boomtown shit died way down, but Houston was rough before it was a boomtown, too, and by this time we were a huge city. What's left of the sentimentalist in me whispers there was a "we're in this together" vibe and every now and then there really would be, as anyone who attended Jean-Michel Jarre's Rendezvous Houston will tell you.
Houston is on some new shit now...I think the population is too young right now. This is mostly young men type crap. Drive-bys, love triangles, gangbangin'....it kind of amazes me the shit that barely makes the news there. About six months ago 18 kids were shot on the set of a rap video but hardly anyone noticed, even though the one fatality was the director of the video, a good kid on track to graduate from UH on the honor roll who was hired only for his camera skills and not any kind of gang affiliation.
18 people shot. Yawn.