Late last year and earlier this year there were several stories here on DK about falling homicide and other crime rates in major US cities last year (such as this and this and one I submitted in October).
Guess what? While it’s still early in the year, the trend is not only continuing but even accelerating, with numbers falling faster so far this year than they did at any point last year.
As he did last year, crime data analyst Jeff Asher's analysis can be found at the link below:
It's Early, But Murder Is Falling Even Faster So Far In 2024
This post needs to begin with an obligatory acknowledgment that it's early April. Any assessment of 2024 data at this point is, at best, an interpretation of imperfect and incomplete evidence that is could change over the course of a full year.
Caveat provided, murder is down around 20 percent in 2024 in more than 180 cities with available data this year compared to a comparable timeframe last year (as of the moment of this piece's publication). Murder is down 20.5 percent in 183 cities with available data through at least January, down 20.2 percent in 174 cities with data through at least February, and down 20.8 percent in 59 cities with data through at least March 20.
Analyzing a large sample of cities is an effective means of figuring out what is happening nationally, but that does not mean that murder is down 20 percent nationally in 2024. We could still see, and perhaps should expect to see the sample's murder decline to regress towards a more normal rate of decline as the year goes on. 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.
Jeff’s data table for this year can be found here. As you would expect, homicides aren’t falling in every city, but they are falling in most cities.
In his blog post he goes on to describe that, at this point in the year (data through the end of March), there is enough data so that the end of the year numbers aren’t usually any more than 5-6 percentage points different from now. Since it was down almost 20% through the end of March, that means the year-end figure is likely to be a decline in the 14%-26% range.
Be sure to point this out to your friendly neighborhood MAGA to watch them go into fits of denial about the data being manipulated and so on, and so forth! :-D