The murder rate in numerous large US cities has undergone a “sharp and broad decline” this year, new research has found, even as the number of mass shootings around the country continues to climb.
Statistics compiled by New Orleans-based AH Analytics show a 12.2% drop in murders in 90 US cities to the end of May over the same period last year, although the study notes there are places, such as Memphis and Cleveland, where the murder rate has actually increased.
And while the overall drop in recorded deaths in that time, from 3,358 in 2022 to 2,948 this year, is a welcome reverse from recent trends, the crime analyst Jeff Asher, who compiled the report, warns that the full-year figures could still rise.
“Even a record double-digit percent decline in murder in 2023 would still mean that a couple thousand more people will be murdered in America this year than in 2019,” he said.
The report will also do little to weaken calls by weapons control advocates and Joe Biden for Congress to pass meaningful gun reforms as the US remains on track for a record number of mass killings in 2023.
According to the National Gun Violence Archive, which defines a mass shooting in which at least four people are killed or injured by firearms, excluding the shooter, there have been 278 such incidents so far this year.
The non-profit has recorded 18,300 deaths by gun violence from all causes, including suicide, an average of of about 800 per week.
Still, Asher says, the US “may be experiencing one of the largest annual percent changes in murder ever recorded” according to data from the cities that he stresses is still preliminary.
“All of that said, the good news is, well, good,” he said in an article published by the Atlantic.
“Murder is down 13% in New York City, and shootings are down 25% relative to last year.”
He cites Los Angeles, Houston and Philadelphia among cities where murders are down by more than 20%. And in Jackson, Mississippi; Little Rock, Arkansas; Atlanta, Minneapolis, Milwaukee and several others, Asher has recorded a drop of more than 30%.
“The US may be experiencing one of the largest annual percent changes in murder ever recorded,” he said.
“[But] the good news comes with the caveat that murder is not uniformly falling everywhere. Memphis, for example, has experienced an uptick following the killing of Tyre Nichols in January.”
The study also potentially blows a hole in recent arguments pushed by Donald Trump and other Republicans that Democrats are ignoring a massive crime wave in US cities.
“Joe Biden and the defund-the-police Democrats have turned our once-great cities into cesspools of bloodshed and crime,” Trump, the former president and frontrunner for his party’s 2024 nomination, said in a recent campaign video.
Last month, the Guardian reported that Republican and rightwing rhetoric over the state of crime in the US could spark a rise in violent incidents and worsen the country’s mass incarceration problem.
The article noted that a more serious crime problem existed in traditionally “red states”.
“The murder rate in the 25 states that voted for Donald Trump has exceeded the murder rate in the 25 states that voted for Joe Biden in every year from 2000 to 2020,” Third Way, a US thinktank, reported in January. Third Way also found that in 2020 murder rates “were 40% higher in Trump-voting states than Biden-voting states”.
Asher said his research suggested “strong evidence of a sharp and broad decline in the nation’s murder rate,” but cautioned it was too soon to draw hard conclusions.
“The current downward shift in murder may reverse between now and December, and even if it doesn’t, it may ultimately prove to be a one-year anomaly,” he said.
“But whatever the causes, and whatever the staying power, the first five months of 2023 have produced an encouraging overall trend for the first time in years.”
