The FBI’s Uniform Crime Report released last month showed that, overall, violent crime in 2023 fell from 2022. And murders dropped 13%. Another recent report supports this trend but shows one of America’s largest cities had a triple-digit number of murders in the first quarter of this year.
A new report from crime-data analyst Jeff Asher, published in The Wall Street Journal, compares murders in major cities in the first quarter of 2024 to the same period of last year. (In some cities, the figures were available for the first week in April.) The only city with a triple-digit murder count for the period was Chicago, at 118. Unlike many other large cities, its 9% decline was very modest.
“There’s just a ton of places that you can point to that are showing widespread, very positive trends,” Asher commented. Boston saw the largest percentage drop among the cities analyzed, with a fall off of 82% to two murders. The total murder numbers in some cities analyzed were probably too low to offer valuable data about percentages. (See the most famous crime that shook each state.)
Other cities with a large number of murders that had a significant percentage drop over the period were Detroit (down 32% to 43), Philadelphia (down 34% to 75), and New York (down 15% to 88).
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