Homicides in US continue to fall from pandemic highs

Homicides in the United States are continuing to dramatically decrease from the surge in violent crime in the first years of the coronavirus pandemic, according to an analysis released Thursday by the nonpartisan Council on Criminal Justice.

The sharp decline began in 2023, with one of the largest yearly drops in homicides, and the decrease has continued over the first six months of this year, the council found in its analysis, which is based on about three dozen cities.

Of the dozen crime categories analyzed, only one showed an increase in the first half of this year: shoplifting. The surge in reported shoplifting — it was up 24% over the first half of the year in the 23 cities for which the council was able to obtain data — comes amid debates around the country, especially in California, about what to do about retail theft.

The analysis cautioned that more investigation was needed to determine how much of the recorded increase reflected a rise in actual shoplifting, and whether any of it was driven by retailers being more likely to report the crime.

But ordinary Americans have become increasingly frustrated by so many products being locked away on store shelves, and outraged by so-called smash-and-grab robberies that are captured on surveillance video and widely shared on social media.

On the matter of violent crime, not only have many offenses fallen sharply this year, especially homicide — which is down 13% this year — but they are now at levels not seen since before the pandemic in the cities that the council studied.

“It’s another double-digit decline that suggests the pandemic-era violence spike is coming to an end,” said Adam Gelb, the council’s president and CEO. “It’s wonderful to see these big drops, but they come with big caveats. They follow large rises, and the progress is very uneven. The overall homicide trend is being driven by large drops in a handful of high-homicide cities.”

Among these cities are Philadelphia, which reported a record number of homicides in 2021, with 562. So far this year, the city has recorded 150 homicides, a decline of 37% compared with the same period in 2023. Baltimore, which has long struggled with a high homicide rate, has seen homicides decline 37% in the first six months of this year.

Overall, across the cities included in the report, there were 2% fewer homicides compared with the same time period in 2019, just before the pandemic. Robberies, aggravated assaults and domestic violence were also down over the same period.

The council began tracking crime trends during the pandemic to fill a gap it saw in timely national crime data collection. The FBI has typically reported full-year data with a long time lag, but this year, for the first time, the agency issued a report for the first quarter, which also showed double-digit declines in violent crime.

The council’s report is limited to about three dozen cities whose police agencies reliably report monthly figures. Among the places included in the report are large cities like Chicago, New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore and Washington, and smaller cities like Rochester, New York, Syracuse, New York, and Chandler, Arizona.

“That unfortunately makes our sample size small,” Gelb said. “It’s not that we wouldn’t want 80 cities, or 800 cities for that matter. The reason why we’re in this range of three dozen plus or minus cities is that that’s who’s posting data.”

The study, with its limitations, provides one snapshot of crime in America, but the overall trends line up with other sources, including the FBI and a database of homicides maintained by Jeff Asher, a crime analyst based in New Orleans and co-founder of AH Analytics, which tracks crime trends. Asher’s database of homicides in 272 cities shows a larger decrease than the council’s study: a 17% drop this year.

“It points to the fact that we have largely returned to or surpassed where we were in 2019,” Asher said.

Even so, two of the crime categories that showed marked declines this year — carjacking and car theft — are still up substantially compared with before the pandemic. Carjacking is up 68% compared with 2019, and car thefts are up 66%.

While the reasons for fluctuations in crime are always contested, Asher said the most plausible explanation was a confluence of factors: society returning to normal after the pandemic; more government spending on violence-prevention programs; and the restarting of community activities by nonprofits that had shut down or curtailed programming early in the pandemic.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

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