Another accounting of remarkable homicide declines to start 2024 (after big declines in 2023)

April 14, 2024

The Wall Street Journal has this new piece, headlined “Homicides Are Plummeting in American Cities,” that covers in some new ways the remarkable homicide data emerging from cities (which I flagged here a few weeks ago). Here are excerpts (to go along with some notable charts and graphs in the WSJ piece):

Homicides in American cities are falling at the fastest pace in decades, bringing them close to levels they were at before a pandemic-era jump. Nationwide, homicides dropped around 20% in 133 cities from the beginning of the year through the end of March compared with the same period in 2023, according to crime-data analyst Jeff Asher, who tabulated statistics from police departments across the country.

Philadelphia saw a 35% drop in killings as of April 12 compared with the same period last year, police data show. In New York City, homicides fell 15% through April 7. Homicides in Columbus, Ohio, plunged 58% through April 7. And Boston had just two homicides this year as of March 31, compared with 11 over the same time frame last year.

The drop is an acceleration of a trend that began last year, following a surge in the number of homicides during the Covid-19 pandemic. The declines so far in 2024, on top of last year’s drop, mirror the steep declines in homicides of the late 1990s….

If the trend continues, the U.S. could be on pace for a year like 2014, which saw the lowest homicide rate since the 1960s. But police officials and researchers cautioned that crime trends aren’t always consistent and future homicide rates are difficult to predict. Some cities, like Denver, Los Angeles, and Portland, Ore., reported rises in homicides as of early April, Asher’s data show. But such increases are outliers. More typical is Baltimore, where homicides have declined 30% so far this year.

During the pandemic, homicide rates shot up around the country, sparking concerns that the progress made during a decadeslong drop in violent crimes had been undone. The number of homicides in the U.S. rose nearly 30% in 2020 from the prior year to 21,570, the largest single-year increase ever recorded by the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

Researchers and authorities attributed the upward spike to several factors, including crime-prevention programs, courts and prisons being unable to operate normally when Covid was spreading; young people not in school due to shutdowns; and law enforcement pulling back after social unrest following the high-profile police killings of George Floyd and other Black people….

Now, police are more engaged and departments are working to hire more officers. Community-based crime prevention programs have resumed. And nationwide social unrest has cooled….

In some cities, the homicide decline has been accompanied by a reduction in property crime as well. San Francisco, where property crime has been a huge problem in recent years, has recorded decreases in burglaries, robberies, larceny thefts and motor vehicle thefts so far in 2024. The city has also seen nine homicides as of April 7, compared with 13 during the same period in 2023.

Crime researchers have been particularly struck by the drops in cities that have been the most plagued with violent crime in recent years, like New Orleans. In the first half of 2022, it had the highest homicide rate of any major U.S. city, according to a Wall Street Journal analysis of crime data. Through April 10 of this year, the number of killings dropped 39% from the same period in 2023.

As I noted in my prior post, it strikes me as notable that the 2023 and 2024 declines in homicide come at a time of relatively little use of the death penalty and relatively lower rates of incarceration by modern US standards. The 1990s involved a significant uptick in death sentences, executions and incarceration rates across the US; the 2020s have seen declines in all these punishment metrics. (Let me state again that I generally doubt that punishment trends alone directly account for homicide trends in any direction.)

A few prior related posts on recent crime trends: