"Remarkable": Despite GOP fear-mongering, experts say new crime data shows US "safest" in decades

Violent crime in the nation's major cities plummeted in the first six months of 2024 as the early COVID-era crime surge subsides, new data suggests. While the drop in violent crime warrants acknowledgement, experts also say it underscores the need for states and the federal government to remain invested in violence prevention efforts.

An Axios analysis of preliminary data from the Major Cities Chiefs Association found that violent crime, which includes homicides, robberies, aggravated assault and rape, has dropped overall by 6 percent in 69 major cities between the first six months of 2024 and the same period in 2023. The MCCA data is one of five sets on violent crime in the U.S. to have recently been released, with each — though with slightly varied estimates — indicating a sharp decline in violent crime that rivals pre-pandemic levels, experts said.

"This builds on news that we have about crime in 2023. If you look back further, you can see that this is a continuation of a downtrend that began a couple of years ago," said Ames Grawert, senior counsel for the Justice program at NYU Law's Brennan Center for Justice. "So it's not just that we're looking at a single year of decline so far in 2024, but it's that this is basically showing a continuation of a downtrend in violent crime nationally to the point that we might be in the process of reversing, or close to fully reversing, some of the increases we saw during the COVID-19 pandemic."

Fifty-four of the 69 cities included in the MCCA data set saw drops in violent crime in the first half of the year, per the Axios review, with some communities seeing more than a 25 percent decline. Columbus, Ohio, saw the nation's largest dip at 41 percent so far, while Omaha, Nebraska, followed with a 30 percent decrease.

Miami, Fla., and Washington, D.C. both had 29 percent declines in violent crime, and Austin, Texas and New Orleans, saw 28 percent and 26 percent decreases respectively.

While the FBI Uniform Crime report points to a similarly significant drop in overall violent crime for the first quarter of the year — showing a 15.2 percent decrease between January and March 2024 compared to the same period in 2023 — other preliminary data sets from NORC at the University of Chicago, AHDatalytics and the Council of Criminal Justice released this summer released data instead outlining percentage decreases specific to different types of violent crime.

John Roman, a senior fellow at NORC, told Salon that most criminologists home in on the homicide numbers to determine crime rates because local and state jurisdictions' reports of homicides are far more consistent and robust than with other types of violent crime.

That focus is in part because of changes in the way cities report crime to the FBI that took effect in 2021, he explained, noting that cities report data voluntarily. Violent crime reporting compliance was at 95 percent before the FBI began requiring incident-level data, but dropped to less than 60 percent afterward, he said. While the percentage of compliance has risen back into the 80s, Roman said homicide data is more reliable.

The MCCA data found that the number of homicides in the 69 reported cities dropped by more than 17 percent between the first six months of this year and the same period of 2023. Boston, Mass., saw a massive 78 percent drop in homicides, while Philadelphia experienced a 42 percent decrease in homicides.

The homicide numbers from the other organizations followed a similar arc, with NORC reporting a 23 percent decrease in the homicide rate, AHDatalytics recording a 17.7 percent drop, and the CCJ noting a 13 percent decline.

"It's a remarkable thing. The homicide rates from each of these groups shows a rate that is below the pre-pandemic levels — that are below 2019 — and they're approaching the lowest levels we've seen since 1960," Roman said. "That would suggest that, if you are under 50, you may well be living in the safest America you've ever lived in."

Should that downtrend hold through the rest of the year, he added, it will amount to the "largest decline in violence that America has seen since we started tracking it."

Violent crime in the U.S. rose just 5 percent between 2019 and 2020, but the nation's murder rate jumped 30 percent, marking its largest single-year increase since agencies began tracking the data. Still, the murder rate in 2020, which was 6.8 murders per 100,000 people, was far smaller than rates seen in during the last significant spike in the 1990s, which peaked at 9.8 in 1991, Grawert said.

The exact reasons why crime skyrocketed with the onset of the pandemic are still unclear but researchers have a few prevailing theories, he said, one of the most accepted of which associates the uptick with the social and economic upheaval of early COVID-era isolation.

Courts and government offices shutting down alongside a decrease in police staffing, widespread job loss and the rollback of social supports and community programs, like community violence interrupters (CVI), teachers and counselors, in the face of restrictions on in-person contact created an opportunity for violence to spike that crested in 2020 and 2021, Roman said.

The 2020 murder of George Floyd and the resulting social unrest likely also compounded with those other factors, attributing to the associations with an increase in violent crime in most U.S. cities, added Alex Piquero, a professor of sociology at the University of Miami.

"When you put all of that together, you have basically an M80 firecracker," said Piquero, who is also former director of the Bureau of Justice Statistics. Four years later, as the nation recovers from the detriment of the early pandemic era, those resources to curb crime have started to return.

"Cops are back staffing. They're back doing the kind of work they're doing. CVI is back on the street. Kids are back in school. Prevention services are back," he said. All of the infrastructure "we know helps reduce crime and delinquency" that had been "basically turned off at the spout are now turned back on."

Massive investments that the federal government made in state and local governments in 2022 and 2023 also gave those initiatives a boost, allowing for an "effective social safety net" to rebound by way of increasing the number of government workers, investments in anti-violence programs and violence reduction programs, and support for people after exiting COVID isolation, Roman said.

President Joe Biden, in a statement to Axios, lauded the American Rescue Plan's police and gun violence legislation assistance in light of the MCCA preliminary data's release.

"Americans are safer today than when Vice President Harris and I took office," Biden told Axios in a statement, adding: "I will continue to urge Congress to fund 100,000 additional police officers and crime prevention and community violence intervention programs, and make commonsense gun safety reforms such as a ban on assault weapons."

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Because violent crime appears to be on a downtrend toward pre-pandemic levels, which saw a 2018 and 2019 murder rate of 5.2 per 100,000 people, according to the FBI Uniform Crime Reporting Program's 2022 estimations, Piquero argued local, state and federal efforts to prevent and reduce crime are more important now than before.

Now is the time to "make sure that we continue doing and providing those services because crime, public safety is not just a short-term, today thing," he said. "It's also a next year thing, it's also a 10 years from now thing. We have to always think about the 15-year-old right now who might put a gun in his or her hands tonight. We got to think about a 10-year-old kid who might be seeing an older brother or sister doing that, and then the five-year-old kid who, in 10 years, might be doing that."

"The question about why crime rose in 2020 is really important," Grawert added. "But I think it may be the even more important question is, 'Why did it come back down and what can we learn from it?'"

In a contentious election year, in which violent crime — and the lack thereof — has become a major talking point for candidates, the preliminary data also swats away one of former President Donald Trump and his allies favored attack lines attaching the issue to Democrats. At the same time, it offers Vice President and Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris a welcome rebuttal to such claims.

Piquero and Grawert warned that Americans should avoid getting wrapped up in the partisan back-and-forth over the violent crime, instead paying attention to policies intended to address it and their impacts while fact-checking the politicians playing to fears around the numbers.

"I hope people walk away saying, 'This is a lot more complicated than I thought, so we need to think about complicated, serious solutions, not rhetoric, not demagoguery, but what can we really do backed by evidence, backed by research, backed by solid policy thinking to reduce crime and violence," Grawert said. The plunge in violent crime "really shows a need for thoughtful work on crime and public safety, which are extremely important subjects, rather than rhetoric."

Roman said that Americans should also take away from the decline is that focused investment in combatting violence and boosting the health and welfare of the public dramatically reducing violent crime incidence shows the nation has control over the issue — and that the legal system doesn't have to be involved to wrangle it.

"It doesn't necessarily have to be about police and courts, doesn't have to be about locking people up," he said. "It can be about supporting people and giving them alternatives to committing violent acts."

"Crime is under our control," Roman added, noting that the government funding for a number of those violence prevention and reduction initiatives will soon run dry. "We do have the ability to move that dial, and it's a question of whether we're willing to do it or not that remains to be seen."