Across large U.S. cities, murders are down by about 17% since last year, with cities like Philadelphia and Baltimore registering particularly impressive declines. The data are consistent with the idea that, as the pandemic has waned, life has returned to normalcy.
Many workers have returned to the office, schools and community centers are open for business and law enforcement has returned to public spaces, having stepped back for public health reasons — and possibly in response to negative community sentiment — in 2020.
A deeper understanding of urban violence demands a more detailed look at longer-run trends, Vital Ciity reports.. New York City experienced a dramatic decline in violence during the 1990s. While murders declined nationally by 50%, they fell by more than 70% in Gotham.
The causes of the so-called Great Homicide Decline are still debated and are far from completely understood, but most researchers believe that the waning of the crack cocaine epidemic, investments in police manpower and management and the rising prison population probably had something to do with it.
At the same time, the nature of violence has shifted. Daniel Penny’s acquittal for the subway death of Jordan Neely reminded many New Yorkers of Bernard Goetz’s 1987 trial for shooting four would-be robbers and has invited comparisons in the popular media.
Vital City offers an issue with insights into what happened in 2024 and what we should look out for in 2025.
Crime analyst Jeff Asher, who runs a Real-Time Crime Index, says that last year, reported violent crimes dropped about 4 percent and property crimes fell 9 percent.
Alex Piquero, Chandler Hall and Nick Wilson consider variation among cities across the U.S., noting that some cities have seen violence decline more than others. What do the most successful cities have in common? They seem to have focused their attention on the people and places that drive the violence and have adopted multiagency, multipronged violence prevention partnerships that adopt a public health approach to violence prevention, engaging a wide range of partners alongside law enforcement.
Asher, Caterina Roman and Marcos Soler each point out in separate contributions that there is a considerable disconnect between the crime data and what members of the public say that they are experiencing. While murders and robberies are down considerably from their peak levels, Americans’ fear of these crimes is at a 30-year high.
Charles Fain Lehman says that disorder — including problems like disorderly behavior by homeless people, public drug use and shoplifting — may explain the perceptual gap.
John Roman writes about how little we actually know about the nature of crime and violence and urges developing a more comprehensive framework to think about crime shifts over time.
Social science methods are designed mostly to test the effects of interventions (e.g., Did a medical treatment reduce mortality? Did a court reform affect public safety?) and are less well designed to understand why the world looks as it does (e.g., Why did crime rise in 2020 and fall after 2021?).
Roman argues we need to develop a more holistic understanding of crime at the macro level, explaining the cyclical nature of crime, accommodating different types of crimes as well as how crime varies across sectors and regions.
Where does this leave us in 2025? On the one hand, the data suggest that, in many respects, public safety is beginning to turn to normalcy after an alarming rise in violence in 2020 and 2021. On the other hand, assaults in New York continue to rise, following a trend that goes back at least 15 years.
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