“Crime in 2024: A Historic Drop in Murder with Declining Violent and Property Crime”

The title of this post is the title of this new substack entry from Jeff Asher reporting (a bit prematurely) on various data on crime trends in the year 2024 with two weeks to go.  Here is some of the text and links from the start of the post:

America’s crime trends in 2024 were remarkably positive with an enormous decline in murder, a continued small but steady decline in violent crime, and a sizable decline in motor vehicle theft on the heels of several years of surges. The nation’s murder rate has largely erased the post-COVID surge and was roughly around or 2019’s level while reported violent and property crime were likely amongst the lowest rates recorded since the 1960s and 1970s.  This assessment is based on an evaluation of data from multiple official and unofficial data sources all painting the same picture.

Murder likely fell at the fastest rate ever recorded in 2024 after falling at the fastest rate ever recorded in 2023 based on an assessment of 2024 crime data from numerous sources.  The Real-Time Crime Index has murder down 16 percent in 309 cities with available data through October 2024, the FBI has murder down 23 percent through June (though it’s almost certainly overstating the decline), the CDC has homicide down 14 percent through May (provisional count), and the Gun Violence Archive has fatal shootings down more than 11 percent as of mid-December.

Not every city in America is experienced a decline this year, and even cities with sharp declines have massive room for continued improvement. Still, the data from many individual cities is remarkable.  As of late November, murder was down more than 40 percent in Philadelphia through late November, down 23 percent in Memphis, down 38 percent in New Orleans, down 15 percent in Los Angeles (where murder was up as of midyear), down 29 percent in DC, down 24 percent in Baltimore, down 20 percent in Kansas City, and I could go on.

The full post has much more data,and lots of charts and graphs, and is worth reading in full. The short story is that the latest crime data is very encouraging and we should all hope recent trends continue.