There is much evidence that murder is falling faster nationally than it has ever before — with the caveat that official murder data only exists through 1960, writes crime data analyst Jeff Asher on Substack. We don’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 a sample of 214 cities with available data, it was down 13.2 percent in the FBI’s quarterly data through 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. That said, there’s still some uncertainty, and none of the available data sources tells us what the FBI is going to estimate with a ton of precision (though all of them point to a very large drop). If we add a 3 percent margin of error on either side of the big city sample, murder was down somewhere most likely down between 8.7 and 14.7 percent nationally in 2023. We’re probably correct in saying that 2023’s decline was the largest ever, but we shouldn’t be shocked if it doesn’t quite eclipse the 1996 decline.
Comments