Some good news from 2011: There were no homicides reported in northern Jefferson County.

Figures from local police departments and the Jefferson County Sheriff show that there were no deaths in the local area which were ruled homicides, or for which a suspect was charged with murder.

That figure follows those from the city of Birmingham, which investigated 57 murders in 2011. That’s five fewer than the previous year, and nearly half the total of 104 from 2006, the most of the previous decade. Murders in Birmingham have declined steadily since 2006.

The city’s record was set in 1991, when 141 homicides were investigated.

Sheriff’s office figures report 16 homicides in the county, up from 12 in 2010. Half of those were from Center Point, which were the closest homicides to our local area. Eight homicides were reported there, four of them by deadly weapon and two by vehicles driven by someone under the influence. Two more people died in an apparent murder-suicide in March, when a man shot his estranged wife before turning the gun on himself.

Three homicides were reported in Mulga in northwest Jefferson County, and the other five were in unincorporated areas.

The metro area’s last murder of 2011 occurred on New Year’s Eve in Fairfield, where a 23-year-old man was shot in an argument on a street. A suspect turned himself in two days later.

Two homicides were reported in Adamsville, plus one in Tarrant in November which ended in the suspect dying during a car chase; police there are still investigating whether that suspect died from gunfire by police or the original victim.

According to published reports, only one murder occurred in Blount County last year. A man was charged with shooting and killing a 66-year-old Locust Fork man in a dispute over the sale of an automobile.

The most recent criminal death reported in the area was that of 16-month-old Justin Stockton, a child with Down syndrome who died from starvation in 2010. His parents were charged with manslaughter. It was one of two criminal deaths investigated in Gardendale in 2010.

Though the killing took place in 2009, one local resident was convicted of murder last year. Bart Wayne Johnson of Kimberly was convicted last May in the shooting of a Pelham police office during a traffic stop along Interstate 65.