Following a spike during the pandemic, the number of homicides in major cities is falling at its quickest pace in decades, a new analysis shows.
Murders declined by 20% in more than 200 cities during the first three months of 2024 compared to the same period last year, according to AH Datalytics.
Boston has seen the largest drop in homicides of any major city in the analysis, down 82% from 11 at this point last year to 2 this year.
Murder is down by 50% or more in San Antonio, Columbus, Durham, Fort Worth and Virginia Beach.
Several cities have also seen the number of murders decline by 30% or more, including Las Vegas, San Francisco, Miami, Pittsburgh, Phoenix, Philadelphia, Baltimore, New Orleans, Austin, Cleveland, Nashville, Milwaukee and Detroit.
On the other hand, the data shows a handful of big cities have seen a jump in homicides compared to last year. The biggest spike is in Baton Rouge, where murders are up 100% from 16 at this point last year to 32 this year.
Murders are also up 44% in Charlotte, 15% in Atlanta, 9% in Los Angeles, 8% in St. Louis, 8% in Albuquerque and 4.5% in Portland.
While it's still too early to say for sure, analysts say the city data suggests a large drop nationally is possible, with some estimating between a 15% and 25% decline by the end of the year. That puts the nation "on track to see one of the lowest levels of violent crimes and homicides since President Obama was in office," Axios reported.
"It's only April and there is a ton of time left in 2024 for these figures to regress, but murder is down roughly twice as much with a sample that's twice as large as what we had last year at this time," crime data analyst Jeff Asher wrote in a recent Substack post. "A murder decline of even half the magnitude suggested by the early 2024 data would place the US murder rate this year largely on par with or below where it was from 2015 to 2019 prior to the surge in murder in 2020.
While crime tends to trend up or down a few percentage points per year, Asher says a 15% or 20% annual decline in murder nationally would be "fantastical" but not out of the realm of possibility. Just as rates jumped 30% in 2020, the largest one-year increase ever recorded, they can theoretically decrease just as rapidly.
"Still, the figures from cities with available data so far this year are encouraging — or at least as encouraging as any data on hundreds or thousands of tragedies can be," Asher wrote.