Sky-high violent-crime rates of recent years have suddenly—mercifully—plummeted.
Rents, average monthly temperatures, grocery prices—most things in American life seem to be rising these days.
But not everything. In 2023, murder rates in the United States dropped at an astonishing rate, probably among the highest on record. That’s according to data gathered by Jeff Asher, an independent criminologist, from cities with publicly available numbers. In the sample of 175 cities, murder is down by an average of almost 13 percent this year.
And it’s not just murder. FBI data for the third quarter show that every category of crime except for motor-vehicle theft is down, some of them sharply, year over year from 2022. (As for the car thefts, they seem—in one of the weirdest data flukes you’ll ever see—to have been driven almost entirely by TikTok videos showing the ease of breaking into certain Kias and Hyundais.) Two years ago, as worries about soaring crime resounded, I wrote that America was in the midst of a violence wave, not a crime wave, as property crime continued to sink even while violent crime rose. Now America seems to be experiencing a peace wave.
“The quarterly data in particular suggests 2023 featured one of the lowest rates of violent crime in the United States in more than 50 years,” Asher wrote in his Substack newsletter.
The drop is unlikely to get the same attention that the increase did. Last month, Gallup found that the percentage of Americans who believe that crime in the United States is a very or extremely serious problem has risen sharply, from 54 to 63 percent, since fall 2021, when I noted the violence wave—even as most types of crime have declined over the same period.
The old adage is that if it bleeds, it leads: Lurid stories attract press coverage. More positive stories, such as the absence of crimes, are less likely to receive attention. This is bad news, so to speak, because mistaken impressions about how much crime is going on can lead policy makers and the public to embrace hasty or poorly considered policies, some of them with serious negative side effects. This is not to say that elevated crime doesn’t call out for response—it’s to say that reaction, rather than overreaction, should be the goal. Calibrating that is harder with inaccurate impressions.
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“Citizens have only the mass media to rely on for information about the national crime picture, and that information is often alarmist, sensationalistic, and decontextualized,” Mark Warr, a sociologist who has studied the perception of crime, told me in 2021. “So crime nationally often looks much worse than it is.”
Dropping crime rates, and the perception (or misperception) of them, could be a factor in next year’s election. During the 2020 election, debates about policing were at the forefront, following the murder of George Floyd. Joe Biden emerged from the Democratic primary in part by charting a centrist course on law enforcement compared with other candidates, who supported reducing spending on police. During the general election, Donald Trump sought to emphasize “law and order”—or, rather, his vision of it—and instill fear in voters. Ahead of the 2022 midterms, some polling indicated that crime fears would badly damage Democratic candidates, though in the end Republicans severely underperformed.
Assuming he is the Republican presidential nominee, Trump is likely to once again run fear-based appeals on crime in 2024, despite his own elaborate legal troubles. If crime is not rising, the lack of headlines about rising crime could help Biden, but scanty coverage of falling crime could also limit the president’s gains. One quirk of the data is that Washington, D.C., where much of the press and the political establishment are based, is one of the few cities that has seen murder rise this year. (Another is Memphis, where, as I have reported, a spike seems to have followed the January murder of Tyre Nichols by city police officers.)
The drop in 2023 comes atop a 6 percent drop in 2022, according to statistics released by the FBI in October. Two consecutive years of declines are doubly encouraging, but one reason the rates are able to drop so much is that they rose so sharply in the two preceding years. Some voices, especially on the left, have hastened to note that even during the worst of the recent bad years, rates still sat below their peaks, in the 1980s. But for the majority of Americans born after 1981, who had seen falling national crime rates and historic lows for most of their lives, this was a jarring reversal.
Criminologists don’t have a precise read on why violent crime started to rise when it did. The coronavirus pandemic and its lockdowns no doubt affected society, but a great deal of evidence points to the midsummer demonstrations and, in some rare cases, riots that followed the killings of Floyd and Breonna Taylor by police. From there, rates started to rise quickly, though the exact reasons are not clear: Did a loss of police legitimacy encourage crime? Were police busy? Was this a bout of “blue flu”? How did the closure of schools and other social programs encourage or facilitate crime?
Similarly, the specific reasons for the drop are also unclear. Part of it is that the conditions that seem to have led to the rise—including the Floyd protests and the pandemic—have eased. But actions taken by policy makers to quell crime may have also helped.
“There is no single trend that explains why violence might rise or fall in different places—for instance, Philadelphia has seen a sharp drop in violence this year, but a couple hours away is Washington D.C., one of the few cities where violence has risen,” the Princeton sociologist Patrick Sharkey told me in an email. “Trends in violence … are affected by how local communities, cities, states, and the national government respond.”
The exact details of the drop in crime won’t be known for months. The FBI releases its annual report on crime in the fall of the following year. Statistics collated by Asher, by Sharkey’s AmericanViolence.org, and by other groups are the best available and have to stand in for official figures. Even once the FBI puts out its annual crime report, reliable comparisons will be difficult, thanks to a shift in the way the federal government collects data. The new approach is expected to produce better information, but the bumpy transition means that 2021 data, for example, are not totally reliable. That said, even without official FBI numbers, the 2023 drop is distinct enough to trust—and celebrate.
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