Is The Great Murder Decline Slowing Down?

It probably will, but it's not clear that it is yet.

My dad took me to Saints games when I was growing up, so I came of age watching some terrible football during the end of the Mora era and entirety of the Ditka era. Given my upbringing, I take it as my duty to take my kids to Saints games whenever I can so that they too can partake in bad football.

Such it was a few weeks ago at a game with my son when the Saints had a contest during a timeout. The contestant was given a player’s number and had to guess whether the next number to be revealed would be higher or lower. The game was innovatively called… Higher or Lower. The contestant correctly guessed that the first player, Pete Warner with #20, would be followed by a player with a higher one, then the contestant rightly guessed that Cesar Ruiz (#51) would be followed by a player with a higher one, in this case Saints defensive tackle Bryan Breese.

The contestant then guessed that the final player’s number would be higher for his last guess. This was a mistake since Breese — a solid second year defensive lineman from Clemson — wears number 90 and only 8 other players on the team wear a higher number. Logic dictated that the final number was likely going to be lower.

The same thing logic could be applied to the future direction of America’s murder trend.

Murder almost certainly declined at the fastest rate ever recorded in 2024 driven by a sharp drop in gun violence. But it would make sense if such a large decline isn’t replicated in 2025 and things start to level off this yeae.

That doesn’t mean murder will inherently increase nationally in 2025, but my prior is that any decline this year will be smaller — perhaps considerably so. There’s some evidence that The Great Murder Decline of 2023 and 2024 is beginning to slow down a bit though the evidence isn’t particularly strong just yet.

Consider the cases of Chicago and New York City where murder and shootings have fallen in 2024, but nowhere near the historic amounts that murder fell nationally (or in both cities in 2023). Shooting victimization was down 4.3 percent in Chicago in 2024 and down 3.5 percent in New York City as of early December.

Graphing shooting victims in both cities rolling over 365 days shows a leveling off of gun violence in each city in 2023 after large declines in 2023.

There are other cities, however, that are continuing to see dramatic declines in gun violence, such as Philadelphia and New Orleans. And some places with available shooting data like Buffalo and Boston may also be seeing more of that same leveling off that Chicago and New York are seeing.

Granular shooting data across dozens or hundreds of cities is, unfortunately, hard to come by. The Gun Violence Archive helps to close some of that gap, and there’s nothing yet in the GVA data suggesting that the trend is abating at a national level…yet.

The Real-Time Crime Index is another great source (I’m biased, of course) for seeing if the national drop is slowing down. Recently updated RTCI data shows the murder decline staying steady through November 2024. Murder was down 15.7 percent in the sample of more than 320 cities with data through November.

Murder was down 35 percent in November 2024 relative to November 2020 (reminder that the current data is unofficial and subject to change!) and down 5 percent relative to November 2019. Murder in the RTCI sample has been lower relative to the corresponding month in 2019 in 3 of the last 4 months.

So, is the Great Murder Decline waning? Ultimately, we’ll have to wait until the first part of 2025 to get an inkling as to the answer. There isn’t really strong evidence for a slowdown just yet though shooting data across a handful of big cities suggests it’s plausible. Still, the best evidence that 2025 will see a smaller decrease is that a historic change is likely to abate at some point.

When will we really know?

I first noticed the potential for a huge decline in murder in February 2024, I first wrote about the record-breaking decline in 2023 in May 2024 (published in June), and I first wrote about the huge surge in murder in 2020 in July of that year. A smaller decline or an end to declining murder will take longer to tease out.

We’re not likely to see such a big decline in murder in 2025 for the simple fact that such a large, unprecedented decline is unlikely to be repeated in such short order. But only time will tell whether the murder decline is starting to plateau or if it can keep declining at a steady clip in the years to come.