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Spoiler alert if you haven’t seen the classic 1942 film “Casablanca”!
After Humphrey Bogart’s character shoots and kills a German major, the French captain who witnessed the murder diverts police by telling them: “Round up the usual suspects.” That wasn’t the first use of that phrase — it apparently originated in the world of New York police and criminals in the 1930s — but it was the usage that popularized the phrase.
It’s also a phrase that comes to mind when I rummage through the latest population estimates from the Weldon Cooper Center for Public Service at the University of Virginia. One way to understand what’s going on beneath the surface of population gains and losses is to look at the two ways localities are either gaining or losing: Do they have more births than deaths or the other way around? Do they have more people moving in than moving out or the other way around?