A Gallup poll from November 2023 found that 63 percent of Americans consider the crime problem in the U.S. either extremely serious or very serious. Yet, despite the the issue being top-of-mind for many people, new data reveal crime, particularly violent crime, is plummeting in major cities across the U.S. Nationwide, homicides fell roughly 20 percent in 133 cities during the first quarter of this year, compared to 2023, according to crime-data analyst Jeff Asher. While the drop is welcome news, Asher’s criminal justice consulting firm AH Datalytics says in its Year-to-Date Murder Comparison that early year data may not be a reliable predictor of final trends. Cities with the biggest drops include:Recent polling has shown that crime has emerged as a top concern for a growing number of Americans.
“There’s just a ton of places that you can point to that are showing widespread, very positive trends,” Asher, who previously worked as an analyst for the CIA and the New Orleans Police Department, told the Wall Street Journal (WSJ). “Nationally, you’re seeing a very similar situation to what you saw in the mid-to-late ’90s. But it’s potentially even larger in terms of the percentages and numbers of the drops.” Crime was on a downward trend across the U.S. until the 2020 pandemic. At that time, homicide rates spiked, rising almost 30 percent from the prior year, the largest single-year increase ever recorded by the FBI, WSJ noted. Even despite a horrific 2023 for Washington, D.C. (violent crime rose 39 percent last year), the nation’s capital has seen a 25 percent decline in homicides during Q1 of this year. However, Asher wrote in a recent article that “it’s far too early to say what will happen in 2024 in Washington, D.C. And really any individual city in the U.S. in terms of year-end crime figures.” D.C. crime trends “have some seasonality to them,” he explains, with more crime occurring in the summer than during winter months. Last year, Asher says, D.C. “saw an unusually large surge in violent crime in June and July.”
