Murders declined at a remarkable rate in America in 2023, with official statistics reporting the largest one-year decline in more than half a century. Even more remarkable: this year, we expect an even greater improvement.
This decline, visible in crime data more recent than that released annually by the FBI, is at odds with the way Donald Trump has largely portrayed crime as a “skyrocketing” increase.
Murders increased at a record rate early in the pandemic. But many cities are now poised to completely reverse that trend in 2024 — a recovery that would be as rapid and surprising as the initial rise in murder rates nationwide.
“We’re seeing the fastest decline on record,” said Jeff Asher, a crime analyst at AH Datalytics, which runs the real-time crime index that tracks local police data. “And there’s no uncertainty about that.”
The decline in murders through August was widespread and occurred in the vast majority of the nation’s largest cities. Even some cities without large increases in homicides in 2020 and 2021 have seen sharp declines this year.
Violent crime more generally, including aggravated assault and rape, has not seen the same sharp increase during the pandemic, but preliminary data from 2024 also shows a decline in these offenses. Results from a study by the Council on Criminal Justice show a 7% drop in aggravated assaults through June as well as a slight decrease in robberies and domestic violence.
Researchers still don’t fully understand what’s caused the pandemic-era increase in violence — and so it’s hard to say what’s driving the decline. It may simply be that life has returned to normal – and crime is changing with it.
But violence increased in the years before the pandemic. This could suggest that cities simply returning to pre-pandemic trends would still have higher murder levels than 2019.
“I think it’s something more,” said John Roman, director of NORC’s Center on Public Safety and Justice at the University of Chicago.
Roman suspects that part of what happened is that cities that cut resources at the start of the pandemic in everything from school counselors to community centers have since put money back into them, with the aid from the federal government.
“If local government invests in all kinds of ways in schools, public health and social welfare, any of those avenues could help reduce crime,” Roman said.
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