Homicides in major US cities falling at ‘one of fastest rates ever’ – report

Homicides in major US cities are falling at likely “one of the fastest rates of decline ever recorded”, a crime analysis has found.

Jeff Asher of AH Datalytics, a New Orleans-based data-analytics company focused on criminal justice, education and the non-profit sector, discussed that finding with the Wall Street Journal on Monday after combing through quarterly data recently released by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI).

“There’s just a ton of places that you can point to that are showing widespread, very positive trends,” Asher told the Journal.

In the company’s sample of almost 200 cities with varying population sizes, murder was down by 20.8% from the period beginning in January through the end of March of this year when compared with the same time period in 2023, as Asher wrote in a recent Substack post on the subject.

Furthermore, in some prominent cities like Washington DC, New Orleans, Las Vegas, Cleveland, Milwaukee, Detroit, Columbus, Nashville and Philadelphia, murder is down by more than 30%.

Asher’s company’s analysis is based on the FBI’s Uniform Crime Reporting program, which collects data from local law enforcement agencies across the country. Because participation in the program is voluntary, not all crime is reported, so experts caution it’s not a complete picture.

Additionally, FBI data from 2023 will not be audited nor made official until about October. And 2024 data will not be audited and made official until about October 2025.

Nonetheless, the preliminary figures reflect particularly heartening news for the US because they suggest that murder had already “plummeted” in 2023 “at one of the fastest declines ever recorded”, according to what Asher wrote in a Substack post late last year.

Updated