(Mostly) Closing The Book On Murder in 2023
A final update on murder in 200+ cities.
Murder almost certainly declined at one of the fastest rates ever recorded in 2023. That does not mean the percent decline is known with certainty, nor does it mean that 2023's decline surely eclipsed the 9 percent decline in 1996. The exact percentage won’t be known for a while.
But it would take an unprecedented misrepresentation of the national trend by city data if a large decline is not revealed in the FBI's final figures sometime this Fall. In the words of Winston Churchill: “This truth is incontrovertible. Panic may resent it, ignorance may deride it, malice may distort it, but there it is.”
Ok, that’s enough melodrama for 2024.
I expanded the murder dashboard to over 200 cities with data for 2022 and 2023 using a gaggle of press reports that came out over the last month or so. Data from the press can sometimes be a bit imprecise for murder totals due to synonymous use of ‘homicide’ and ‘murder.’ Additionally, some media reporting includes incidents like vehicular homicides in their totals which very much do not count in terms of the FBI definition. But it’s the best we can do with the available imperfect data.
I will probably update the dashboard a few more times as quarterly and monthly data through December trickles in, but I wouldn’t expect the final numbers to change too much. All told, murder was down around 12 percent in more than 200 cities with available data with about 28 percent of the cities recording an increase. About 65 percent of cities have data available through sometime in December and 86 percent have data through late November.
Of course murder falling in a majority of US cities does not mean that it is falling everywhere. Murder increased quite a bit in places like Topeka (KS), Greensboro (NC), and Shreveport (LA). Indeed, increasing murder in Memphis alone plays an outsized role in the murder count as removing Memphis from the equation takes the sample from a little over 12 percent decline to around a 13.1 percent decline. But a trend, by definition, does not mean every data point is moving in the same direction, and a preponderance of evidence points to a clear trend this year in terms of murder. (Am I being a bit defensive? Yes. Did I recently spend an hour on C-Span answering questions about the veracity of any data ever analyzed that has left me feeling a tad on the defensive? Also yes).
About 80 million people live in the sample's 200+ cities accounting for about a quarter of the US population and would make up about half of US murders in 2023 assuming murder declined by around around 10 to 12 percent nationally last year. Of the roughly 80 million people in the sample, around 63 million people live in a city where murder fell (78 percent), 2.83 million people live in a city where murder was even (3.5 percent), and 15 million people live in a city where murder rose (18 percent).
Please remember that this sample does not forecast a precise figure for the murder change but rather it allows for a relatively confident assessment that murder fell by somewhere around 12 percent (plus or minus a few percentage points). So the FBI might say in 9 months that murder declined by 8 or 9 percent in 2023 and that shouldn’t be surprising, or they might say that it declined by 13 or 14 percent an that also shouldn’t be surprising. Our options for understanding national crime trends right now are to wait until October 2024 or use a smaller sample of cities, and I'm choosing the latter method.
There is data (though not necessarily through December) for every city with 1 million people or more in the FBI’s 2022 Uniform Crime Report, over 90 percent of cities with 250,000 or more people, 28 percent of cities with 100,000 to 250,000 people, and just 1.7 percent of small cities under 100,000. Murder is down considerably in cities over every size though the smallest, least represented cities have the most uncertain change and the smallest decline (-6 percent).
Murder declined by 20 percent in St Louis though the city likely barely edged out Memphis for the nation’s highest murder rate for cities 250,000 or more. Much of the high St Louis murder rate is driven by the city’s tiny size in relation to the much larger St Louis metro area. Memphis almost certainly recorded the highest murder rate ever reported there while Detroit possibly fell out of the top 6 highest murder rates for big cities for the first time since 1979.
Below is a table of the top 20 murder rates per 100,000 for cities 250,000 or more. I’m going to show it to you because I think there’s value in being able to contextualize murder rates between cities. That said, the murder counts are not finalized and I’m using 2022 population figures1 from the FBI to calculate rates. In other words, the rates are still somewhat in flux and should be taken with a grain of salt (cue news article definitively citing INSERT CITY HERE as the 14th highest murder rate nationally in 2023). Additionally, I have some qualms about comparing crime rates between cities given population selection issues, but I have produced the table nonetheless. I calculated a pace figure for cities that didn't have data available through December 31.
Of note, New York City’s murder rate (roughly 4.7 per 100,000) would rank around 68th highest of the 83 cities over 250,000 with available data.
So thus mostly concludes the murder count for 2023. As far as 2024 goes, the trend looks very promising with murder up in only 4 of the 32 cities with available data and shootings down 18 percent in Gun Violence Archive data, but it’s too small of a sample and waaaaaaaaaaaay too early draw any strong conclusions about the year.
There are lots of things — like more arctic blasts making the median high temperature in Chicago 8 degrees colder in 2024 than in 2023 — that could explain this early change, so it’s sufficient to appreciate the 2023 trend and check back on 2024 in a few months.
Louisville did not report to the FBI in 2022 so that city’s population is derived from 2021 reporting.