Murder & Gun Violence Are Still Falling Fast At The Start Of 2026

But the rate of decline might be slowing.

Folks, it’s early. The data is preliminary, the trends are subject to change, and the truths right now may not be the truths at the end of the year.

It’s so early that the Mets aren’t even disappointing their fans yet, so take it with a grain of salt. But. The evidence so far is that the trends of 2025 have largely continued into the first few months of 2026.

There are four different data sources I want to rely on to preliminarily assess murder and gun violence trends in the US.

First, let’s start with the Real-Time Crime Index. The RTCI sample for January 2026 was released last week showing murder down 30 percent in a sample of nearly 500 agencies covering around 100 million people nationwide. Longtime readers may recognize that the sample is considerably smaller than in recent months (last month’s sample had around 100 more agencies covering 15 million more people).

I’ll be honest, putting together a sample for January data is really difficult. It’s early in the year so YTD is pretty meaningless¹. It’s also cold so crime counts are usually their lowest or second lowest (after February) of the year in most cities. It’s also a new year so many agencies haven’t restarted their reporting practices yet — at least one state is sending us their data this week so we will update the data with a somewhat larger sample.

The result is a smaller, less reliable sample than we’ll get in a few months. The RTCI is a data point but not a particularly reliable one at the moment.

The trend is a little clearer in the below table of 30 police departments with the most murders in 2025 that also had data through February 2026. Those agencies were down close to 30 percent in January (again, not predictive) and are down more than 20 percent so far in 2026.

It’s too early to say what this will mean for the national change in 2026, but it is suggestive that murder was down a good bit in the first two months of 2026. These cities will be predictive of the national change later in the year, so keeping tabs on them is a good way of evaluating the trend ones the leaves become more tea-like later in the year.

The Gun Violence Archive is another source pointing to the continued drop in gun violence in 2026. Shooting victims were down 12 percent nationally through February in the GVA and the data as of mid March suggests the drop is becoming less steep.

Finally, I built a shooting tracker that provides updated data on shooting victims and incidents from 25 agencies (GIVE’s 28 agencies counted as one). The tracker scrapes data daily from each of these sites and updates as best it can. This isn’t perfect, but it’s a good way of evaluating changing gun violence trends in an automated and hopefully easy to use fashion.

Anyhow, unsurprisingly, the shooting tracker finds shootings down nearly 20 percent in the places that have easily accessible (and scrapable) shooting data.

So, there we have it. We can start evaluating national crime trends in a more predictive fashion once May/June get here. In the meantime, we can say from the very early, very preliminary data that murder and gun violence are still down at the start of 2026 though there is some evidence that the decline is starting to slow. Stronger conclusions will have to wait a few months.

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New on the Jeff-alytics Podcast

Ferne Pearlstein and Bob Edwards made a documentary more than a decade ago called “The Last Laugh” which talked about how comedy can tackle a tragedy as immense as the Holocaust and what lessons that might suggest for effectively communicating about crime. This is a bit of a leap for me creatively — as they might say in the biz — but it’s a conversation that I really wanted to have and one that I really enjoyed.

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1. Hi Jerry!