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 FBI, is at odds with how Donald Trump has broadly framed crime as rising “through the roof.”
Murders surged at record rates early in the pandemic. 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 who runs the Real-Time Crime Index that tracks local police data. “And there’s no uncertainty with this.”
The drop in murder through August has been widespread, occurring across the vast majority of the country’s largest cities. Even some cities without a steep surge of homicides in 2020 and 2021 have had big declines this year.
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. The findings from a study by the Council on Criminal Justice show a 7% decline in aggravated assault through June as well as small decreases in robbery and domestic violence.
Researchers still don’t fully understand what caused the pandemic-era rise in violence — 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.
But violence was rising in the years leading up to 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 at NORC’s Center on Public Safety and Justice at the University of Chicago.
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.
“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,” Roman said.
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