Murder In The US -- A Record? October 14, 2023

Locator: 45781B.

Link here.

The United States may be experiencing one of the largest annual percent changes in murder ever recorded ... the author is a crime analyst based in New Orleans and co-founder of AH Datalytics.

Not on my bingo card.

Not widely reported.

I seem to get statistics on everything ... so how did I miss this one? 

Wow, look at this lede:

Murder is down about 12 percent year-to-date in more than 90 cities that have released data for 2023, compared with data as of the same date in 2022. Big cities tend to slightly amplify the national trend—a 5 percent decline in murder rates in big cities would likely translate to a smaller decline nationally. But even so, the drop shown in the preliminary data is astonishing.

The good news comes with the caveat that murder is not uniformly falling everywhere. Memphis, for example, has experienced an uptick following the killing of Tyre Nichols in January. Additionally, even a record double-digit percent decline in murder in 2023 would still mean that a couple thousand more people will be murdered in America this year than in 2019. Finally, mass shootings are on the rise even as overall gun violence appears to be falling.

All of that said, the good news is, well, good. Murder is down 13 percent in New York City, and shootings are down 25 percent, relative to last year as of late May.

Murder is down more than 20 percent in Los Angeles, Houston, and Philadelphia. And, most significantly, murder is down 30 percent—30 percent!—or more in Jackson, Mississippi; Atlanta, Georgia; Little Rock, Arkansas; Minneapolis, Minnesota; Milwaukee, Wisconsin; and others.

Explaining the trend is much more difficult than describing it. The cause of the Great Crime Decline of the 1990s, when murder fell 37 percent over six years, is still not fully understood, so any explanations of the current trend must remain in the hypothesis phase for now.

The national nature of both the surge in murder in 2020 and the apparent decrease this year suggests that national explanations will be more convincing than local anecdotes. Moreover, the factors that caused murder to begin to spike in the summer of 2020 may not be the same factors (now, theoretically, in reverse) that are contributing to its decline in 2023.

It is interesting. It doesn't seem like we've had much civil strife this past summer. Maybe it's just selective memory.