Tuesday, August 20, 2024

Murder declines nationally at record pace

 There is a lot of evidence that murder is falling faster nationally than it has ever before — with the caveat that official murder data only exists through 1960, according to Jeff Asher at Jeff-alytics.

We won’t know just how fast murder fell in 2023, but all of the available data points to a decline that was at or near the fastest pace ever recorded last year. Murder was down 11.7 percent in our sample of 214 cities (see the link to 2023 data at the bottom) with available data, it was down 13.2 percent in the FBI’s quarterly data through Q4 2023, and it was down 12.2 percent in the 31 states that had published data as of about a month ago. Other sources such as CDC’s WONDER and the Gun Violence Archive also point to large declines in homicides and fatal shootings respectively.

One reason to suspect that last year was at or near the largest ever recorded is that murder usually doesn’t decline all that fast from one year to the next. The largest decline ever recorded came in 1996 and that was just 9.1 percent (by contrast, there had been 7 one-year increases that were larger than 9.1 percent before 2020’s monumental increase), so even a double-digit decline in murder would be the largest ever recorded.

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