In 2021, homicides are now down in Boston, Cincinnati, Chicago, Dallas, Jacksonville, Kansas City, New York City, St. Louis and …
this post is intended to highlight that one can now mine data from this webpage, where AH Datalytics has compiled a “YTD Murder Comparison” for 73 cities, to now tell an encouraging story about US homicide trends. Critically, though, here I am cherry picking data, as there are many more cities on the list in which homicides are up rather than down. And, of course, given last year’s significant homicide increases in most cities, having some decreases in homicide in some cities is not something to celebrate robustly.
Still, the trends are continuing to be encouraging. The latest NYC data through Aug 1, 2021, show a dramatic decline in homicides over the last month, which has now turned 2021 into a down year for homicides in Gotham City. As I have noted before, on July 12 in this tweet, Jeff Asher noted that the “change in murder relative to last year is dropping in cities with data. A few weeks ago it was +22%, last week it was +18%, now it’s +16%.” And now, as of early August, Asher’s data show we are down to a 13% year-to-date increase, providing further reason to be hopeful that the COVID-era homicide spike may already be ending.
If these encouraging trends continue, we could end up seeing declines in homicides nationwide by the end of 2021. Still, every homicide is one too many. And, like with the pandemic, it seems wise not to make too many bold predictions about what will happen next month or the month after that in cities or elsewhere (where we lack great real-time crime data). That said, I think the recent data trends in a number of big cities provide an important counter to the homicide spike narrative that has been prevalent over the last year and that has risked derailing some criminal justice reform efforts.
Prior recent related post: