Cities saw historic drop in homicides in 2023, data tracker says. ‘Numbers are clear’
American cities saw a historic drop in homicides in 2023, bucking a sharp rise during the pandemic, according to a data tracker.
There were 8,656 homicides in 177 U.S. cities over the past year, marking an average annual decrease of 12.8%, according to AH Datalytics, a company that tracks nationwide crime.
“The numbers are clear,” Jeff Asher, co-founder of the company, told McClatchy News. “The double-digit decline would be extraordinary as the largest one-year decline on record.”
In order to reach this eye-catching conclusion, the company analyzed data reported from cities, media reports and the Major Cities Chiefs Association, which publishes quarterly reports, Asher said.
The data shows homicides dropped in about three-quarters of the cities sampled, including America’s largest cities. In New York City, Los Angeles and Chicago, homicides fell by around 11%, 15% and 13%, respectively.
There were outliers, though. The murder rate ticked up in 26% of sampled cities, including in Washington, D.C., and El Paso, which saw increases of 36% and 26%, respectively.
Homicides in the 177 city sample comprise about half of the nation’s murders in 2023, making it a good representative sample, Asher said.
Historically, murders in these cities tend to diverge by around 2% from the national average, meaning this year’s national homicide numbers should be down by between 11% and 15%.
“Either one of (those percentages) would be the largest decline ever reported,” Asher said.
This year’s extraordinary drop-off in murders follows a massive surge — around 30% — that occurred in 2020, Asher said.
The upswing in 2020 marked the largest year-over-year increase in over a century, according to the Pew Research Center.
Reality at odds with perception
This year’s unprecedented drop in murders is at odds with a widespread belief that crime is actually increasing nationwide.
The majority of Americans, 77%, believe crime is worse than it was one year ago, according to a Nov. 16 Gallup poll that surveyed 1,009 U.S. adults.
A smaller majority, 55%, said they believed crime was on the rise in their community, per the poll.
But, in addition to homicides, nearly every type of reported crime — including rape, robbery and assault — has trended down over the past year, Asher wrote in a Substack post. The only exception was car theft, which increased in 2023.
Asher said this mismatch is “frustrating as someone who works in data.”
“The evidence is clear,” Asher said. “Most people are going to live in a place where crime decreased.”
But, according to research, crime data has no bearing on peoples’ concerns about crime, Barry Glassner, a sociologist and author of “The Culture of Fear: Why Americans Are Afraid of the Wrong Things,” previously told McClatchy News.
“My recommendation is to get the facts,” Glassner said. “See whether, in fact, crime is up in your community or if instead you’re hearing a lot about specific incidents that may in fact be alarming, but that do not in any way indicate a trend that you need to worry about.”
The United States has long been an outlier among industrialized countries when it comes to homicides, according to Statista, a German data tracker. Between 2000 and 2021, the U.S. homicide rate was more than double the rate of other G7 countries, including Canada, the U.K. and France.
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