Growing Evidence That Murder Fell At A Record Pace In 2023

Using state UCR program data to evaluate 2023's murder trend.

How many murders were there in 2023? That seems like a pretty easy question to answer but it’s surprisingly complex due to the slowness with which official estimates are published.

The FBI won’t publish their 2023 estimates until October 2024, so workarounds require either gathering data from dozens or hundreds of cities (like we do with our YTD murder dashboard) or relying on the FBI’s quarterly data. Our YTD murder dashboard had murder down 11.7 percent in 214 cities while the FBI’s Q4 2023 quarterly report had murder down 13 percent.

There is, however, another source of murder data just now becoming available for estimating 2023 crime statistics: State UCR programs. I was able to gather murder data from 31 states for the full year of 2022 and 2023 representing nearly 65 percent of the US population.

Murder was down 12 percent in 2023 relative to 2022 in this sample which provides exceptionally strong evidence that murder fell by double digits last year. The previous largest recorded decline in murders was a 9.1 percent drop nationally in 1996, so the state sample adds another piece of evidence that murder likely fell at the fastest pace ever recorded nationally in 2023.

Murder was down in 26 of the 31 states with murder even in one state (Nevada) and up only 1 in two (Minnesota and Wyoming) relative to 2022. Maine was the only state with a double digit increase in murder due to the October 2023 mass shooting in Lewiston (CORRECTION - Rhode Island was +11, so there were two states up double digits).

If we assume that murder fell by the 12 percent as predicted by the state UCR data and we also assume that the 2022 figures won’t be dramatically increased or decreased when the 2023 figures are released in October then there were around 18,500 murders in 2023 and a murder rate of roughly 5.5 per 100,000. Adding on a substantial decline in 2024 suggested by the city data so far would put the US murder rate largely in line with or below where it was before COVID.

A 12 percent decline in 2023 would represent by far the greatest percent decline and the greatest number of declining murders from one year to the next ever recorded. The below graph shows the change in murders from one year to the next since 1961 though the 2023 figures rely on a fair amount of guesswork at this point.

A sample of this many states has historically done a good job of predicting the national trend. Data on murders from these 31 states has had an absolute average miss of 1.5 percentage points above or below the final national estimated change from the FBI with a standard deviation of 1.34 percentage points. So a national decline of somewhere between 9 and 15 percent is a seemingly pretty safe bet at this point.

A few notes on methodology for gathering this sample:

1. The deadline to report data to the FBI has passed, but the sample may be overstating the change because some agencies may not have reported 2023 data that reported 2022 data.

2. It’s also possible that the sample is understating the decline because we know that NIBRS uptake increased in 2023 relative to 2022 and so the 2023 count from these states may represent more agencies than the 2022 count. Take California, for example, where there are 24 agencies that reported data for 2023 that didn’t report data in 2022 versus just 4 agencies that reported data for 2022 that didn’t report data for 2023.

3. Ohio is incomplete as only about 70 percent of the state reported data publicly. I included only agencies that reported both 2022 and 2023 data for Ohio.

4. New York State data doesn’t include New York City for 2023, so I added it in to get an apples-to-apples comparison.

5. Nebraska’s state UCR website has seemingly contradictory figures for 2022 murders and appears to have had underreported data for Omaha. As such, I relied on the state’s 2022 annual report for a murder figure for the state.

6. Mississippi reporting is also incomplete (Jackson is not included), but I’ve included the state anyway.

7. I didn’t include Florida’s data because only a small fraction of the state’s population is represented in the publicly available dataset.

8. Kentucky has data available but doesn’t break down homicide offenses into murders, so that state wasn’t included.

9. Wisconsin kindly provided their 2022 and 2023 murder figures via email.

Data from states on top of data from cities and quarterly data from the FBI point to the likely largest decline in murder ever recorded having occurred in 2023. By the end of August we should have data from a few other states to add to the list, so stay tuned!