Crime is falling rapidly in many U.S. cities for the second year in a row, a decline attributed in part to the end of the pandemic’s empty streets and shuttered stores.
The decrease in homicides and assaults in many U.S. cities has been largely ignored by Republican politicians like Donald Trump, who will appear before the Fraternal Order of Police on Friday seeking the group’s endorsement as he campaigns for the White House once more.
Trump and others have assailed Democrats including presidential nominee Kamala Harris as weak on crime, and have falsely claimed that violence has continued to climb while President Joe Biden is in office.
In fact, last year saw a sharp drop in killings and shootings. The first half of 2024 shows that trend generally continuing, with homicides down 17 percent compared with the same six-month period the prior year, according to figures for 69 U.S. cities compiled by the Major City Chiefs Association.
Violent crime shot up during the pandemic and its immediate aftermath. In 2020, killings jumped nearly 30 percent, the largest one-year increase since the federal government began compiling national figures in the 1960s.
Most of that increase was driven by gun crimes. One of the worst hot spots was Portland, Ore., which saw a 148 percent increase in shooting incidents between 2019 and 2023, according to city data. Last year, shootings fell more than 21 percent, and they are still falling this year.
“Violent crime and gun crime in Portland experienced meteoric rises over the last few years,” Portland Police Bureau spokesman Mike Benner said. That department, like many around the country, has increasingly focused on where shootings happen, since that is often the best indicator of where they will happen again.
“Ultimately, no one factor, from focused investigation, to collaboration partnerships, to enhanced data utilization can be identified as the cause for this reduction,” Benner said. Instead, he said, the combination seems to be driving crime down.
The vast majority of violent crimes are investigated and prosecuted by local law enforcement agencies. The federal government, in turn, has tried to boost those efforts by providing more help, in the form of agents, prosecutors, and technology that can more quickly trace spent bullet casings back to the people who pull the triggers.
“Our work is paying off,” Attorney General Merrick Garland said in a written statement. “The Justice Department has been bringing every single resource we have to bear in the fight against violent crime, including by investing in advanced technological tools like crime gun intelligence, ballistics analysis, and firearms tracing that help local police departments solve crimes, disrupt illegal gun trafficking, and prevent future shootings.”
Homicides fell about 25 percent in the nation’s capital in the first half of this year — to 91, compared with 119 in the first six months of 2023, according to the major chiefs data. Baltimore saw an even steeper decline, from 142 killings to 90. In Detroit, homicides fell from 123 to 103 — a level not seen since 1966.
“Our numbers are well below even our pre-covid days, so we believe what we are doing is working even more effectively than what we were doing before covid,” said Dawn Ison, the U.S. Attorney in Detroit. She noted that public perception of crime, fueled by coverage on local cable news stations, often doesn’t match the reality.
“People get most of their news from the local news and that perception is skewed,” she said.
Ison said federal agencies, including ATF and federal prosecutors, have helped local police by giving them faster ballistics information and charging some defendants federally if doing so gets dangerous people off the street.
“The violence is committed by a relatively small number of people in a relatively small number of places, so we changed our strategy to focus on those few who drive so much violence,” she said. “One thing we do differently is … move with urgency to charge them in federal court.”
Federal prosecutors in Detroit take what Ison calls an “Al Capone approach” to some gang suspects — charging them with less traditional crimes, like unemployment insurance fraud, if they can’t immediately charge a violent crime. Capone was a Prohibition-era Chicago gangster known as “Scarface” who ultimately went to prison for tax crimes.
Law enforcement is increasingly focused on working gun cases faster. In Detroit and other cities, ATF is helping to analyze spent bullet casings at every shooting scene and enter that data into internal systems quickly, so that guns can be linked to suspects faster, and arrests made before their next potential shooting.
“ATF is following the bullets basically back to the perpetrator. It’s almost like DNA, and we’re using that technology in combination with stuff we already know, to identify people we don’t know, and that is a game changer,” Ison said.
In Nashville, homicides fell almost 14 percent in the first half of 2024 compared with the same period last year, according to the major city chiefs’ data. Boston recorded just four homicides in the first six months of the year.
Such declines are not universal, however; Miami saw homicides rise from 14 to 20 in the first six months of the year, Charlotte-Mecklenburg, N.C., had 61 killings, up from 45 in the first half of 2023, and a few other large cities recorded increases as well. Far more experienced significant declines, however: Cleveland dropped from 89 killings in the first half of 2023 to 60 this year, homicides in Houston fell from 175 to 148, and Philadelphia recorded 61 homicides, down from 105 in the first half of last year.
Lisa Monaco, the No. 2 official at the Justice Department, said the figures show the federal strategy is working.
“Across the country — in cities like Detroit and Cincinnati — with our partners, we’re using intelligence to identify the most violent trigger pullers and take them off the streets — in real time,” Monaco said in a written statement.
