The Big-City Murder Rate Is Falling and the Reasons Won’t Surprise You.

Violent crime — specifically, the murder rate — spiked in 2020 and has been coming down gradually ever since. Now, in 2023, the number of murders in the United States has dropped precipitously. Jeff Asher published a piece in The Atlantic  revealing that “[m]urder is down about 12 percent year-to-date in more than 90 cities that have released data for 2023, compared with data as of the same date in 2022.”

Is defunding the police actually working? Is the prevailing policy of prosecutors giving out light sentences to hardened thugs leading to a “come to Jesus” moment for criminals and causing them to reform?

Not hardly. In the wake of the sky-high violent crime rates from 2020, big-city mayors hired more cops, and many departments reinstituted “aggressive policing methods” to deal with the out-of-control shootings and murders.

“It is possible that police departments have returned to some of the proactive work that they curtailed during the COVID pandemic and after George Floyd, activities that may be inhibiting some gun violence,” Jerry Ratcliffe, a criminal-justice professor at Temple University in Philadelphia, told Asher.

Many cities have used federal COVID-relief money to hire more police officers, and there is some evidence—albeit preliminary—that adding police officers helps to reduce homicide, while also leading to more arrests for low-level offenses. We do not yet know how successful agencies have been at growing their ranks or whether more police officers are resulting in fewer shootings. Murder is down in Chicago, New Orleans, and New York, for example, but Chicago’s number of police officers is virtually unchanged from last summer, while New Orleans’s is down more than 8 percent and New York has roughly 2 percent fewer officers.

More police and more aggressive tactics resulting in fewer murders? Whoda thunk it? Duh.

In fact, the decline in the number of murders is not uniform across the country’s big cities. Some locations like New York and Los Angeles have seen a double-digit drop in murders this year so far while other cities have seen a much more modest decrease.

Judd Legum of Popular Information is demanding the media cover the decline in murders as extensively as they covered the spike in 2020-21.

The precipitous decline in the murder rate, however, has not merited any dedicated coverage in the nation’s largest newspapers, including the New York Times, the Washington Post, USA Today, the Wall Street Journal, and the Associated Press. It also has been rarely mentioned on cable news channels.

In many large cities, the decline in the murder rate, year-to-date, is even more pronounced. Year-to-date murders have declined 40% in Minneapolis, 28% in Atlanta, 26% in Los Angeles, 20% in Philadelphia, and 18% in Baltimore. But local coverage of these declines has been sparse or nonexistent.

Legum apparently isn’t familiar with the economics of the news business. “If it bleeds, it leads” also refers to crime stats. News consumers aren’t very interested in reading about the declining number of murders. But big scary headlines and TV news stories about an increase in the number of killings mean a lot more eyeballs and a jump in ad revenue for the outlet.

Certainly, there’s more to the decline in murders and violent crime in big cities beyond a larger police presence and aggressive, proactive policing strategies. But for a city suffering from a spike in murders and other violent crimes, it’s a damn fine place to start.