Murder in US continues steep decline, FBI reports

The number of murders reported in the United States dropped in 2023 at the fastest rate on record, continuing a decline from the surge in homicides during the pandemic, the FBI reported Monday.

The FBI’s report, which is the agency’s final compilation of crime data for 2023, showed that there were about 2,500 fewer homicides in 2023 that year than in 2022, a decline of 11.6%. That was the largest year-to-year decline since national record-keeping began in 1960, according to Jeff Asher, a crime data analyst based in New Orleans.

Overall, violent crime fell 3% and property crime fell 2.6% in 2023, with burglaries down 7.6% and larceny down 4.4%. Car thefts, though, continue to be an exception, rising more than 12% from the year before.

The latest data is consistent with earlier preliminary reports from the FBI, and with research from other organizations and criminologists, all showing continuing declines in most crime, including murder.

Even so, crime remains a point of contention in the presidential race, with the Republican nominee, former President Donald Trump, describing American cities as crime-ridden dystopias. Polling shows that Americans remain concerned about crime, and that there is a consistent gap between crime data and the public perception of the problem. For instance, a Gallup poll last year found that 77% of Americans believed crime was rising, even though it was actually falling.

“Perceptions of safety are not driven by numbers in spreadsheets,” said Adam Gelb, CEO of the Council on Criminal Justice, a nonprofit policy research group that produces its own reports on crime in America. “They are about what people see and hear and feel on the streets, on TV and in their social media feeds. They are not sitting around studying the FBI’s website.”

Though the overall trend in crime is downward, there were still 19,252 murders last year in the United States, according to the FBI. And the progress was not uniform, with some cities, like Washington, D.C., Greensboro, North Carolina, and Memphis, Tennessee, showing big increases in homicides last year, Asher noted in an analysis he published Monday.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

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