Latest CCJ accounting of crime trends shows most good news for first half of 2023

The Council on Criminal Justice (CCJ) continues its important and timely work on modern crime trends through this latest report titled “Crime Trends in U.S. Cities: Mid-Year 2023 Update.”   This press release about the report provides an effective summary in its title: “Homicide, Other Violent Crimes Decline in U.S. Cities but Remain Above Pre-Pandemic Levels.”  Here is more from the press release:

Examining homicides in 30 cities that make homicide data readily available, the analysis found that the number of murders in the first half of 2023 fell by 9.4% compared to the first half of 2022 (a decrease of 202 homicides in those cities).  Twenty of the study cities recorded a decrease in homicides during the first six months of the year, ranging from a 59% drop in Raleigh, NC, to a 2% drop in Nashville, TN.  Ten cities experienced an increase in homicide, ranging from about 5% in Seattle to 133% in Lincoln, NE.

Motor vehicle thefts, which began to rise at the onset of the pandemic, continued an upward trend.  Considered a “keystone crime” that facilitates the commission of homicide and other offenses, motor vehicle theft rose by 33.5% in the first half of the year, representing 23,974 more stolen vehicles in the 32 cities that reported data.  Seven of those cities experienced an increase of 100% or more, led by Rochester, NY, (+355%) and Cincinnati (+162%).  Overall, the number of vehicle thefts from January to June 2023 was 104.3% higher than during the same period in 2019.  While it’s likely that much of the increase is the result of thefts of Kia and Hyundai models, the authors said, rates were rising before the cars became popular targets.

In other findings, gun assaults (-5.6%), robberies (-3.6%), nonresidential burglaries (-5%), larcenies (-4.1%), residential burglaries (-3.8%), and aggravated assaults (-2.5%) all fell in the first six months of this year compared to the same timeframe last year.  Drug offenses rose by 1% and domestic violence by 0.3%.

The encouraging homicide data should not be a big surprise to followers of this blog, since I have been posting on homicide data pretty regularly based in part on data collected on this AH Datalytics webpage.  (Indeed, as this writing, that page is showing a cumulative decline of nearly 12% for nearly 100 large US cuties.)  But declines in many other violent crimes is also encouraging, though the motor vehicle theft stories is quite discouraging.