Murders declined at a remarkable rate in America in 2023, with official statistics showing the largest one-year drop in more than half a century. Even more remarkable: This year looks on track for an even greater improvement.
That decline, visible in more recent crime data than what is published annually by the F.B.I., is at odds with how Donald J. Trump has broadly framed crime as rising “through the roof.”
Murders surged at record rates early in the pandemic (starting in 2020 when Mr. Trump was still president). But many cities are now poised in 2024 to fully reverse that rise — a recovery that would be as swift and surprising as the initial nationwide spike in murder rates.
“We are seeing the fastest decline ever recorded,” said Jeff Asher, a crime analyst with AH Datalytics and a former Upshot contributor, who runs the Real-Time Crime Index that tracks local police data. “Oftentimes, we’re squishy and there’s doubt, or there’s uncertainty. And there’s no uncertainty with this.”
Our understanding of crime data can be clouded by the long lag in official statistics, the fact that many crimes aren’t reported to police, and differences in the multiple methods the federal government uses to track crime (the early pandemic era was also fraught for data collection of all kinds). But murders are different: Nearly every one is counted, and today we have relatively up-to-date counts in many cities and states.
In addition to Mr. Asher’s findings, murder data tracked by the Council on Criminal Justice and NORC at the University of Chicago tell this same story, each surveying different collections of cities than the 30 largest with available data that we show above. The drop, like the rise before it, has touched red and blue parts of the country alike, reinforcing that crime trends often ignore politics — even if politicians don’t describe them that way.
Violent crime more broadly, including aggravated assault and rape, did not see the same steep increase during the pandemic, but preliminary 2024 data shows declines in these offenses, too. Official 2024 statistics from the F.B.I. won’t be available until next fall. But the findings from the Council on Criminal Justice study show a 7 percent decline in aggravated assault through June this year as well as small decreases in robbery and domestic violence.
The drop in murder through August this year has been widespread — occurring across the vast majority of the country’s largest cities, and appearing even in places like Washington and Kansas City, Mo., that notably didn’t improve last year.
Two other cities, Nashville and Fort Worth, are roughly even with 2019 levels. And because some of the largest declines have come in places with historically high murder rates, like Philadelphia and Baltimore, that has had a disproportionate effect on pulling murder counts among all large cities closer to their 2019 total.
There is little precedent for how to think about the last few years, which contain both the fastest one-year rise in murder in recorded U.S. history and now the fastest decline. Does this data mean that communities have been surprisingly effective at processing the social ills of 2020? Should we have expected this downturn? And so fast?
“I don’t think anything about this was inevitable,” Mr. Asher said. “Look at the ’80s and ’90s. There was a big increase, and it stayed there for a decade.”
Researchers still don’t fully understand what caused the pandemic-era rise in violence — if it stemmed from changes in gun sales, police activity, drug markets or just daily routines, to name a few theories. And so it’s hard to say what is driving the decline. It may simply be the case that life has largely gone back to normal — and crime trends with it.
The year 2020 was obviously an abnormal one. The onset of the pandemic disrupted daily patterns of life and economic stability. The death of George Floyd prompted widespread protests, rising distrust of the police and a withdrawal by officers patrolling communities. And the presidential election that year was its own upheaval.
“As we just move away from those three things all co-occurring, we do expect to get closer to that status quo,” said Ernesto Lopez, a senior research specialist at the Council on Criminal Justice.
But violence was rising in the years leading up to the pandemic. And in 34 cities studied by the Council on Criminal Justice, average homicide rates were already up more than 30 percent over the previous year in January and February of 2020, just before American cities began to lock down during the pandemic. That might suggest that cities simply returning to prepandemic trends would still have murder levels above 2019.
“I think this is something more,” said John Roman, director of the Center on Public Safety and Justice at NORC. More than just a return to previous trends, that is.
Some further evidence for that idea: Even some cities without a steep surge of homicides in 2020 and 2021 have had big declines this year.
Mr. Roman suspects part of what has happened is that cities that slashed resources early in the pandemic on everything from school counselors to community centers have since poured money back into them, with federal help. The country lost more than 1.25 million jobs in local government between March and May of 2020, including workers like those counselors and community center staff. All of those jobs — and more — have since come back.
“If you have local government investing in schools, public health and social welfare in all kinds of ways, any of those pathways could help reduce crime,” Mr. Roman said.
Within the broad-based decline in violence, however, there are still curious variations in local patterns that defy straightforward explanations. Some cities appear to follow none of these trends — like Memphis, where murders remain stubbornly elevated, or Dayton, Ohio, which never saw a pandemic surge. Or Boston, where an astonishingly steep decline in murders has happened this year.
Some of the other starkest changes in crime during the pandemic era involved not violence but property crime, including auto theft. Both auto theft and carjacking rose during the pandemic but appear to be trending down in 2024 as well, although those offenses remain well above prepandemic levels.
Murders make up a small fraction of all crime. But their unexpected jump in 2020 helped shape public fears of deteriorating safety. Now, as another election approaches, the news of their decline has garnered a lot less attention.
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