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In this post at mid-year 2022, I flagged this AH Datalytics webpage‘s “YTD Murder Comparison” Dashboard that collects homicide data from police reports in nearly 100 big cities. I noted in that post that, after significant increases in homicides throughout the US in 2020 and 2021, it was encouraging that the dashboard then showed that nearly two-thirds of big cities were reporting homicide declines in 2022 relative to 2021 and that nationwide murders in large cities were down overall more than 2% at mid-year 2022. Fast-forward six months, and there is more encouraging homicide data coming from big cities.
Specifically, with nearly all police data for 2022 collected, this dashboard as of this evening indicates that nearly two-thirds of all big cities reported that homicides wre down in 2022 relative to 2021 and that the total nationwide murders in large cities were down overall nearly 5% at by year end 2022. Of course, these reported homicide declines for 2022 follow notably high homicide rates in many locales in 2021, and we still have a long way to go to get back to pre-pandemic homicide levels.
Still, these data are encouraging, and the downward trends in homicides in our nation’s largest cities for all of 2022 may be carrying over to the start of 2023. Specifically, based on the dashboard data and (linked) police reports, we see:
Chicago homicides down 13% in 2022 and down another 17% in first two weeks of 2023
Los Angeles homicides down 5% in 2022 and down another 39% in first two weeks of 2023
New York City homicides down 11% in 2022 and down another 12% in first two weeks of 2023
Philadelphia homicides down 9% in 2022 and down another 43% in first two weeks of 2023
Of course, these four very big cities are not fully representative of what may be going on with homicides nationwide as 2023 gets started, and homicide trends in the first two weeks of January could change in many ways in the weeks and months ahead. Still, these encouraging data reinforce my hope that surging homicides in 2020 and 2021 were mostly a pandemic era phenomenon and that lower homicide rates may soon be more common.
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