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Encouraging big-city homicide trends continuing into 2023

By Douglas Berman

A couple months ago, in this post just a few weeks into 2023, I again flagged this AH Datalytics webpage‘s “YTD Murder Comparison” Dashboard that collects homicide data from police reports in nearly 100 big cities.  I noted in that post that, after significant increases in homicides throughout the US in 2020 and 2021, it was encouraging that the dashboard showed that nearly two-thirds of big cities were reporting homicide declines in 2022 relative to 2021 and that nationwide murders in large cities were down nearly 5% for 2022.  

Of course, these reported homicide declines for 2022 followed particularly high homicide rates in many locales in 2021, and we still have a way to go to get back to pre-pandemic homicide levels.  But I found these nationwide big-city data to be encouraging for 2022, especially because in mid-January the downward trends in homicides in our nation’s very largest cities appeared to be carrying over to the start of 2023.  Following up, this morning I took a look at a few updated police reports to see if these positive 2023 homicide trends are continuing a couple months later, and the encouraging trends are so far persisting.  Specifically, based on the dashboard data and (linked) police reports, we see:

Chicago homicides down 14% in 2022, and down another 11% in first two+ months of 2023

Los Angeles homicides down 5% in 2022, and down another 30% in first two+ months of 2023

New York City homicides down 11% in 2022, and down another 19% in first two+ months of 2023

Philadelphia homicides down 9% in 2022, and down another 20% in first two+ months of 2023

Of course, these four very big cities are not fully representative of what may be going on with homicides nationwide as 2023 shifts into daylight savings and warmer weather.  And homicide trends in the first two months of this year could change in many ways in the weeks and months ahead.  Still, these encouraging homicide data continue to reinforce my hope that the surging number of homicides in just about every part of the US through 2020 and 2021 were mostly a pandemic era phenomenon and that lower homicide rates may soon be more common.