Homicides declined last year in nearly two dozen U.S. cities, though many communities still continued to face higher levels of deadly violence than they did in 2019, before a spike in killings, according to a new report on crime trends.
The report by the nonpartisan Council on Criminal Justice also said that while numerous cities saw violent crime fall in 2023 from the year before, other offenses increased over the same period, including motor vehicle thefts.
“Overall, crime rates are largely returning to pre-COVID levels as the nation distances itself from the height of the pandemic, but there are notable exceptions,” said the think tank’s report, which was released Thursday. A copy was shared with The Washington Post ahead of its public release.
Communities across the country have seen a welcome decline in the levels of bloodshed they endured in 2020 and 2021, when rates of gun deaths rose to their highest levels in a quarter-century. Experts say there was no single explanation for what drove that increase, though they cited as possible factors the stress of the coronavirus pandemic, which began in 2020, and the rising number of guns nationwide.
Data released by the FBI last fall showed that homicides and violent crime overall fell in 2022 from the year before. Many places then saw homicide decline further in 2023.
The homicide decrease across the country is “not as large as the increase was in 2020, but combining 2022 and 2023, what I expect to see is a large, possibly historic decline,” said Jeff Asher, a crime analyst and consultant.
“We’re trending towards 2019, but have not reached those numbers yet,” said Asher, who is part of the Council on Criminal Justice’s working group on crime trends but was not involved in the report released Thursday.
The report examines data from a relatively small number of places - including the country’s largest cities, such as New York, Los Angeles and Chicago - and the analysis cautions that they “are not necessarily representative of all cities in the United States.” But the declines in many of those places still come as positive news for communities where homicides had been rising only a few years ago.
Police in Philadelphia reported 410 killings across that city last year, down from 499 in 2020, 562 in 2021 and 514 in 2022. Even with last year’s decline, the city still saw more killings than the 353 that police reported in both 2018 and 2019.
The New York City police say there were 391 murders in 2023, down from the previous year and the first time since 2019 that the city saw fewer than 400 killings in one year. Chicago police said they had 617 murders in the city last year, down from 709 in 2022, 804 in 2021 and 778 in 2020.
In Los Angeles, the police reported 327 homicides last year, down from 392 the year before - and, officials said, it was the first time in nearly a decade that the city saw more deaths from traffic crashes than homicides.
Still, these experiences were not universal. Memphis had nearly 400 homicides last year, breaking a record set only two years earlier, when the city had nearly 350 homicides.
In Washington, meanwhile, homicides surged in 2023 over the previous year, with 274 killings - up 35 percent from the year before. The nation’s capital had a homicide rate in 2023 that was higher than nearly all of the nation’s largest cities. Homicides were not the only crime to climb significantly in Washington: Carjackings also soared, and many of them involved young people.
Although murder was declining across the country, the goal should still be reducing it further, Asher said.
“We should strive towards even lower,” he said. “We should strive towards historic lows. I certainly think … the current trend is very positive, but that there’s still work to be done.”
The report released Thursday is the latest in a series of analyses that the Council on Criminal Justice has produced since 2020 exploring crime trends. This newest report said it included 38 cities in its study based on those that had crime data available, though not all had information reported across all categories. While 32 cities are described as having available homicide data, only 10 reported carjacking data, for instance.
According to the report, the homicide rate across the 32 cities examined went down 10 percent in 2023 from the previous year. At the same time, the report continued, the homicide rate in those cities was still up 18 percent over what it had been in 2019. Homicides, the report said, have “yet to fully recede but, except in some cities, [are] trending in the right direction.”
While homicides and gun violence were up significantly in recent years, crime nationwide is still lower than it was a few decades ago, said Bryanna Fox, a professor of criminology at the University of South Florida and a former FBI special agent.
“We’re getting better at addressing crimes, particularly the most serious ones, [including] homicide,” said Fox, who co-directs her school’s Center for Justice Research and Policy.