Latest news with #Real-TimeCrimeIndex
New York Post
3 days ago
- Business
- New York Post
White House celebrates plummeting murder rates as levels dip below pre-COVID numbers
WASHINGTON — Nationwide murder rates are on course to plummet for the third year in a row, with one prominent analyst saying that 2025 could see the lowest number of per capita killings on record. 'Since President Trump took office, murder rates have plummeted across the entire United States,' White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said in a statement on Tuesday. 'American families were promised their communities would be safer and President Trump swiftly delivered by vocally being tough on crime, unequivocally backing law enforcement, and standing firm on violent criminals being held to the fullest extent of the law.' Advertisement According to the FBI, 2014 saw the lowest murder rate dating back to 1960 — with 4.46 killings per 100,000 Americans. In 2023, the most recent year for which FBI statistics are available, the murder rate dropped to 5.75 per 100,000 from a recent high of 6.83 per 100,000 in 2020, a year that saw the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic as well as widespread racial unrest. In 2024, according to the Real-Time Crime Index — a database maintained by AH Datalytics which compiles reports from more than 400 local agencies — the homicide rate dipped again, to 4.97 per 100,000, below the official FBI rate in both 2018 (5.15) and 2019 (5.17). Advertisement In the first three months of this year, the real time index shows, the number of murders has dropped by a further 21.6% from the same period in 2024. '[I]t's fairly clear that a decline in the direction we're currently seeing would safely give 2025 the title of lowest US murder rate ever recorded,' independent analyst Jeff Asher wrote in a May 12 Substack post. 5 Line graph from AH Datalytics showing reported murders nationwide from 2018-2025. Real-Time Crime Index 5 White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt speaks during a press briefing at the White House in Washington, D.C., the United States, on May 29, 2025. Xinhua/Shutterstock Advertisement Trump took office vowing to crack down on crime — especially crime committed by illegal migrants — and celebrate law enforcement officials for putting wrongdoers behind bars. In April, officials lined the White House lawn with 100 mugshots of deported illegal aliens, along with lists of the crimes they were accused of committing. 'Good policy fosters good outcomes,' FBI spokesperson Ben Williamson said Tuesday. 'Under this administration's leadership, our federal law enforcement teams are receiving the tools and support they need to crush violent crime and keep the American people safe, and that's exactly what they're doing. We have much more to do, but let good cops be cops, and the results will follow.' The nationwide decline is being reflected in some of America's largest cities. Advertisement In New York, year-to-date murder rates have dropped 28.2%. The local stats show the city's 112 murders in the first five months of this year reflect a 34.1% drop from the same point in 2023, a 41.4% dip from 2010 — and an eye-popping 85.7% drop from this point in 1993. 5 Trump has stressed that the administration will be tough on crime. Andrew Leyden/NurPhoto/Shutterstock 5 Police at the scene where two men were shot inside the Canal Street NQRW subway station at Broadway in New York, NY around 1 a.m. on January 28, 2023. Christopher Sadowski 5 A woman and a man were found shot to death near or inside 1347 Jefferson Avenue in Bushwick around 7:45 AM on February 11, 2025. Gregory P. Mango Philadelphia, which consistently ranks as among the deadliest cities in America, reported a 14.7% dip in year-to-date murder numbers. The pattern is repeating in Chicago (23% decline year-to-date), Baltimore (24%) and New Orleans (25%).
Vox
24-05-2025
- Politics
- Vox
Something remarkable is happening with violent crime rates in the US
is an editorial director at Vox overseeing the climate, tech, and world teams, and is the editor of Vox's Future Perfect section. He worked at Time magazine for 15 years as a foreign correspondent in Asia, a climate writer, and an international editor, and he wrote a book on existential risk. The astounding drop in violent crime that began in the 1990s and extended through the mid-2010s is one of the most important — and most underappreciated — good news stories of recent memory. That made its reversal during the pandemic so worrying. In the first full year of the pandemic, the FBI tallied 22,134 murders nationwide, up from 16,669 in 2019 — an increase of roughly 34 percent, the sharpest one-year rise in modern crime record-keeping. In 2021, Philadelphia alone recorded a record 562 homicides, while Baltimore experienced a near-record 337 murders. Between 2019 and 2020, the average number of weekly emergency department visits for gunshots increased by 37 percent, and largely stayed high through the following year. By the 2024 election, for the first time in awhile, violent crime was a major political issue in the US. A Pew survey that year found that 58 percent of Americans believed crime should be a top priority for the president and Congress, up from 47 percent in 2021. And yet even as the presidential campaign was unfolding, the violent crime spike of the pandemic had already subsided — and crime rates have kept dropping. The FBI's 2023 crime report found that murder was down nearly 12 percent year over year, and in 2024 it kept falling to roughly 16,700 murders, on par with pre-pandemic levels. The early numbers for 2025 are so promising that Jeff Asher, one of the best independent analysts on crime, recently asked in a piece whether this year could have the lowest murder rate in US history. Related How US drug overdose deaths dropped by record numbers All of which raises two questions: What's driving a decrease in crime every bit as sharp as the pandemic-era increase? And why do so many of us find it so hard to believe? The crime wave crashes We shouldn't jump to conclusions about this year's crime rates based on the early data, especially since we're just now beginning the summer, when violent crime almost always rises. Crime data in the US is also patchy and slow — I can tell you how many soybeans the US raised in March, but I can't tell you how many people have been murdered in the US this year. Related The Supreme Court just got an important police violence case right But what we can tell looks very good. The Real-Time Crime Index, an academic project that collects crime data from more than 380 police agencies covering nearly 100 million people, estimates there were 1,488 murders in the US this year through March, compared to an estimated 1,899 over the same months last year. That's a decrease of nearly 22 percent. Violent crime overall is down by about 11 percent. Motor vehicle theft, which became an epidemic during the pandemic, is down by over 26 percent. Peer down to the local level, and the picture just keeps getting better. In Baltimore, which The Wire made synonymous with violent, drug-related crime, homicides fell to 199 last year, its best showing in over a decade. As of early May, the city had 45 murders, down another third from the same period last year. City emergency rooms that were once full of gunshot victims have gone quiet. How much lower could it go nationally? The record low homicide rate, at least since national records started being kept in 1960, is 4.45 per 100,000 in 2014. So far this year, according to Asher, murder is down in 25 of the 30 cities that reported the most murders in 2023. Asher argues that if the numbers hold, 'a 10 percent or more decline in murder nationally in 2025 would roughly tie 2014 for the lowest murder rate ever recorded.' What's behind the drop? In short: The pandemic led to a huge increase in violent crime, and as the pandemic waned, so did the wave. The closure of schools during the pandemic, especially in already higher-crime cities in the Northeast, meant far more young men — who are statistically more likely to be either perpetrators of violent crime or victims of it — on the streets. The closure of social services left fewer resources for them to draw on; and the sheer stress of a once-in-a-lifetime health catastrophe set everyone on edge. The murder of George Floyd in spring 2020 led to a collapse in community trust in policing, which in turn seemed to lead to less aggressive policing altogether. As the pandemic eased, though, those buffers came back, providing a natural brake on violent crime. But the government, from the national level down to cities, also took direct actions to stem the flood of violence. The White House under President Joe Biden poured hundreds of millions of dollars into community violence interruption programs, which aim to break the cycle of retribution that can lead to homicide. Baltimore's Group Violence Reduction Strategy has brought together community groups and law enforcement to deter the people considered most likely to get involved in gun violence. And the erosion in police forces nationwide that occurred during the pandemic has largely stopped. The situation is far from perfect. Even though Floyd's murder triggered a nationwide reckoning around police violence, recent data shows that police killings kept increasing, in part because fear of crime often stopped momentum around reforms. Here in New York, even as overall crime on the subways has fallen to historical lows, felony assaults on the trains have kept rising, fueling fears of lawlessness. Why can't we believe it? As Memorial Day weekend marks the start of summer, the next few months will tell whether the pandemic was truly just a blip in the long-term reduction in violent crime. But what we can say is most people don't seem to notice the positive trends. An October 2024 poll by Gallup found that 64 percent of Americans believed there was more crime nationwide than the year before, even though by that time in 2024, the post-pandemic crime drop was well under way. But such results aren't surprising. One of the most reliable results in polling is that if you ask Americans whether crime is rising, they'll say yes. Astonishingly, in 23 of 27 national surveys done by Gallup since 1993, Americans reported that they thought crime nationwide was rising — even though most of those surveys were done during the long crime decline. Crime is one of the best examples we have of bad news bias. By definition, a murder is an outlier event that grabs our attention, inevitably leading the nightly local news. Sometimes, as during the pandemic, that bias can match reality. But if we fail to adjust to what is actually happening around us — not just what we think is happening — it won't just make us think our cities are more dangerous than they really are. It'll sap energy for the reforms that can really make a difference. A version of this story originally appeared in the Good News newsletter. Sign up here!
Yahoo
16-05-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
The Good News About Crime
This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here. You don't hear a lot of good news these days, and you hear even less good news about crime. In fact, this is a consistent structural problem with crime reporting. When crime is rising, it gets a great deal of attention—following the old newsroom adage that 'if it bleeds, it leads.' Most news consumers are probably aware that starting in 2020, the United States witnessed one of the most remarkable increases in crime in its history. Murder rose by the highest annual rate recorded (going back to the start of reliable records, in 1960) from 2019 to 2020. Some criminal-justice-reform advocates, concerned that the increase would doom nascent progress, tried to play it down. They were right to point out that violent crime was still well below the worst peaks of the 1980s and '90s, but wrong to dismiss the increase entirely. Such a steep, consistent, and national rise is scary, and each data point represents a horror for real people. What happened after that is less heralded: Crime is down since then. Although final statistics are not yet available, some experts think that 2024 likely set the record for the steepest fall in the murder rate. And 2025 is off to an even better start. The year is not yet half over, and a lot can still change—just consider 2020, when murder really took off in the second half—but the Real-Time Crime Index, which draws on a national sample, finds that through March, murder is down 21.6 percent, violent crime is down 11 percent, and property crime is down 13.8 percent. In April, Chicago had 20 murders. That's not just lower than in any April of the past few years—that's the best April since 1962, early in Richard J. Daley's mayorship. One of the great challenges of reporting on crime is the lack and lateness of good statistics. The best numbers come from the FBI, but they aren't released until the fall of the following year. Still, we can get a pretty good idea of the trends from the data that are available. The Council on Criminal Justice analyzed 2024 data from 40 cities on 13 categories of crime, and found that all but one (shoplifting) dropped from 2023. Homicide was down 16 percent among cities in the sample that reported data, and in cities with especially high numbers of murders, such as St. Louis, Baltimore, and Detroit, they fell to 2014 levels. Even carjacking, which suddenly had become more common in recent years, was down to below 2020 levels—though motor-vehicle theft was higher. A separate report from the Major Cities Chiefs Association, which gathers leaders of police departments in the biggest cities, found similar trends: a 16 percent drop in homicide from 2023, and smaller reductions in rape, robbery, and aggravated assault. Another great challenge of reporting on crime is how vague our understanding is of what drives changes in crime. Even now, scholars disagree about what led to the long decline in crime from the 1990s until the 2010s. One popular theory for the 2020 rise has been that it was connected to the murder of George Floyd and the resulting protests, though that allows for several possible pathways: Were police too occupied with protests to deal with ordinary crime? Were they de-policing as a sort of protest (the 'blue flu')—or were they pulling back because that was the message the protests were sending them and their leaders? Did the attention to brutal law enforcement delegitimize police in the eyes of citizens, encouraging a rise in criminal behavior? Any or all of these are possible, in various proportions. A Brookings Institution report published in December contends that the pandemic itself was the prime culprit. The authors argue that murder was already rising when Floyd was killed. 'The spike in murders during 2020 was directly connected to local unemployment and school closures in low-income areas,' they write. 'Cities with larger numbers of young men forced out of work and teen boys pushed out of school in low-income neighborhoods during March and early April, had greater increases in homicide from May to December that year, on average.' Because many of these unemployment and school-closure-related trends continued for years, they believe this explains why high murder rates persisted in 2021 and 2022 before falling. The journalist Alec MacGillis has also done powerful reporting that makes a similar argument. Recognizing the real trends in crime rates is important in part because disorder, real or perceived, creates openings for demagoguery. Throughout his time in politics, President Donald Trump has exaggerated or outright misrepresented the state of crime in the United States, and has used it to push for both stricter and more brutal policing. He has also argued that deportations will reduce crime—with his administration going so far as to delete a Justice Department webpage with a report noting that undocumented immigrants commit crime at lower rates than native citizens in Texas. The irony is that Trump's policy choices could slow or even reverse the positive trends currently occurring. Reuters reports that the Justice Department has eliminated more than $800 million in grants through the Office of Justice Programs. Giffords, a gun-control group founded by former U.S. Representative Gabby Giffords, warns that this includes important aid to local police departments for preventing gun violence and other forms of crime: 'Trump is destabilizing the very foundations of violence prevention programs across the country.' The administration's economic policies also threaten to drive the U.S. into recession, which tends to cause increases in crime, as it may have done in 2020. Upticks in crime driven by misguided policy choices would be tragic, especially coming just as the shock of 2020 is fading. Good news isn't just hard to find—it can also be fleeting. Related: What's really going on with the crime rate? (From 2022) The many causes of America's decline in crime (From 2015) Here are three new stories from The Atlantic: The mother who never stopped believing her son was still there The visionary of Trump 2.0 An autopsy report on Biden's in-office decline Today's News Some Republicans in the House Budget Committee, demanding deeper spending cuts, voted against President Donald Trump's tax bill. The Supreme Court temporarily blocked the Trump administration from using a wartime law to deport a group of Venezuelan immigrants. Israel's air strikes killed roughly 100 people in north Gaza, according to local health officials. Evening Read 'We're Definitely Going to Build a Bunker Before We Release AGI' By Karen Hao In the summer of 2023, Ilya Sutskever, a co-founder and the chief scientist of OpenAI, was meeting with a group of new researchers at the company. By all traditional metrics, Sutskever should have felt invincible: He was the brain behind the large language models that helped build ChatGPT, then the fastest-growing app in history; his company's valuation had skyrocketed; and OpenAI was the unrivaled leader of the industry believed to power the future of Silicon Valley. But the chief scientist seemed to be at war with himself. Read the full article. More From The Atlantic The question the Trump administration couldn't answer about birthright citizenship The birthright-citizenship case isn't really about birthright citizenship. The new MAGA world order A different way to think about medicine's most stubborn enigma Culture Break Take charge. You may be fine with becoming more like your parents or hate the idea. Either way, it's something you can control, the happiness expert Arthur C. Brooks writes. Read. Amanda Hess's new book examines a surplus of experts and gadgets promising to perfect the experience of raising children, Hillary Kelly writes. Play our daily crossword. Stephanie Bai contributed to this newsletter. Explore all of our newsletters here. When you buy a book using a link in this newsletter, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic. Article originally published at The Atlantic
Atlantic
16-05-2025
- Politics
- Atlantic
The Good News About Crime
This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here. You don't hear a lot of good news these days, and you hear even less good news about crime. In fact, this is a consistent structural problem with crime reporting. When crime is rising, it gets a great deal of attention—following the old newsroom adage that ' if it bleeds, it leads.' Most news consumers are probably aware that starting in 2020, the United States witnessed one of the most remarkable increases in crime in its history. Murder rose by the highest annual rate recorded (going back to the start of reliable records, in 1960) from 2019 to 2020. Some criminal-justice-reform advocates, concerned that the increase would doom nascent progress, tried to play it down. They were right to point out that violent crime was still well below the worst peaks of the 1980s and '90s, but wrong to dismiss the increase entirely. Such a steep, consistent, and national rise is scary, and each data point represents a horror for real people. What happened after that is less heralded: Crime is down since then. Although final statistics are not yet available, some experts think that 2024 likely set the record for the steepest fall in the murder rate. And 2025 is off to an even better start. The year is not yet half over, and a lot can still change—just consider 2020, when murder really took off in the second half—but the Real-Time Crime Index, which draws on a national sample, finds that through March, murder is down 21.6 percent, violent crime is down 11 percent, and property crime is down 13.8 percent. In April, Chicago had 20 murders. That's not just lower than in any April of the past few years—that's the best April since 1962, early in Richard J. Daley's mayorship. One of the great challenges of reporting on crime is the lack and lateness of good statistics. The best numbers come from the FBI, but they aren't released until the fall of the following year. Still, we can get a pretty good idea of the trends from the data that are available. The Council on Criminal Justice analyzed 2024 data from 40 cities on 13 categories of crime, and found that all but one (shoplifting) dropped from 2023. Homicide was down 16 percent among cities in the sample that reported data, and in cities with especially high numbers of murders, such as St. Louis, Baltimore, and Detroit, they fell to 2014 levels. Even carjacking, which suddenly had become more common in recent years, was down to below 2020 levels—though motor-vehicle theft was higher. A separate report from the Major Cities Chiefs Association, which gathers leaders of police departments in the biggest cities, found similar trends: a 16 percent drop in homicide from 2023, and smaller reductions in rape, robbery, and aggravated assault. Another great challenge of reporting on crime is how vague our understanding is of what drives changes in crime. Even now, scholars disagree about what led to the long decline in crime from the 1990s until the 2010s. One popular theory for the 2020 rise has been that it was connected to the murder of George Floyd and the resulting protests, though that allows for several possible pathways: Were police too occupied with protests to deal with ordinary crime? Were they de-policing as a sort of protest (the ' blue flu ')—or were they pulling back because that was the message the protests were sending them and their leaders? Did the attention to brutal law enforcement delegitimize police in the eyes of citizens, encouraging a rise in criminal behavior? Any or all of these are possible, in various proportions. A Brookings Institution report published in December contends that the pandemic itself was the prime culprit. The authors argue that murder was already rising when Floyd was killed. 'The spike in murders during 2020 was directly connected to local unemployment and school closures in low-income areas,' they write. 'Cities with larger numbers of young men forced out of work and teen boys pushed out of school in low-income neighborhoods during March and early April, had greater increases in homicide from May to December that year, on average.' Because many of these unemployment and school-closure-related trends continued for years, they believe this explains why high murder rates persisted in 2021 and 2022 before falling. The journalist Alec MacGillis has also done powerful reporting that makes a similar argument. Recognizing the real trends in crime rates is important in part because disorder, real or perceived, creates openings for demagoguery. Throughout his time in politics, President Donald Trump has exaggerated or outright misrepresented the state of crime in the United States, and has used it to push for both stricter and more brutal policing. He has also argued that deportations will reduce crime—with his administration going so far as to delete a Justice Department webpage with a report noting that undocumented immigrants commit crime at lower rates than native citizens in Texas. The irony is that Trump's policy choices could slow or even reverse the positive trends currently occurring. Reuters reports that the Justice Department has eliminated more than $800 million in grants through the Office of Justice Programs. Giffords, a gun-control group founded by former U.S. Representative Gabby Giffords, warns that this includes important aid to local police departments for preventing gun violence and other forms of crime: 'Trump is destabilizing the very foundations of violence prevention programs across the country.' The administration's economic policies also threaten to drive the U.S. into recession, which tends to cause increases in crime, as it may have done in 2020. Upticks in crime driven by misguided policy choices would be tragic, especially coming just as the shock of 2020 is fading. Good news isn't just hard to find—it can also be fleeting. Here are three new stories from The Atlantic: Today's News Some Republicans in the House Budget Committee, demanding deeper spending cuts, voted against President Donald Trump's tax bill. The Supreme Court temporarily blocked the Trump administration from using a wartime law to deport a group of Venezuelan immigrants. Israel's air strikes killed roughly 100 people in north Gaza, according to local health officials. Evening Read 'We're Definitely Going to Build a Bunker Before We Release AGI' By Karen Hao In the summer of 2023, Ilya Sutskever, a co-founder and the chief scientist of OpenAI, was meeting with a group of new researchers at the company. By all traditional metrics, Sutskever should have felt invincible: He was the brain behind the large language models that helped build ChatGPT, then the fastest-growing app in history; his company's valuation had skyrocketed; and OpenAI was the unrivaled leader of the industry believed to power the future of Silicon Valley. But the chief scientist seemed to be at war with himself. More From The Atlantic Take charge. You may be fine with becoming more like your parents or hate the idea. Either way, it's something you can control, the happiness expert Arthur C. Brooks writes. Read. Amanda Hess's new book examines a surplus of experts and gadgets promising to perfect the experience of raising children, Hillary Kelly writes.
