#decrease in murder rate

News you won't find on Fox News or other far right outlets.

Official crime statistics are only released after a substantial delay, so for nearly a decade I’ve collected and compiled big-city crime data as a way to assemble a more real-time picture of national murder trends. And this spring, I’ve found something that I’ve never seen before and that probably has not happened in decades: strong evidence of a sharp and broad decline in the nation’s murder rate. The United States may be experiencing one of the largest annual percent changes in murder ever recorded, according to my preliminary data. It is still early in the year and the trend could change over the second half of the year, but data from a sufficiently large sample of big cities have typically been a good predictor of the year-end national change in murder, even after only five months.

It's in the interests of extremist Republicans to get white people in particular to think that out of control minorities are out to murder them. So when crime goes down, the GOP ramps up other things like culture war issues.

Murder 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. Big cities tend to slightly amplify the national trend—a 5 percent decline in murder rates in big cities would likely translate to a smaller decline nationally. But even so, the drop shown in the preliminary data is astonishing.

True, there is still the sensational murder here or there which will get a disproportionate amount of coverage. But murder rates across the board are down notably.

[T]he good news is, well, good. Murder is down 13 percent in New York City, and shootings are down 25 percent, relative to last year as of late May. Murder is down more than 20 percent in Los Angeles, Houston, and Philadelphia. And, most significantly, murder is down 30 percent—30 percent!—or more in Jackson, Mississippi; Atlanta, Georgia; Little Rock, Arkansas; Minneapolis, Minnesota; Milwaukee, Wisconsin; and others.

The last significant drop in crime took place in the 1990s during the Clinton administration.

The cause of the Great Crime Decline of the 1990s, when murder fell 37 percent over six years, is still not fully understood, so any explanations of the current trend must remain in the hypothesis phase for now.

I hate to rub it in, but there seems to be at least a modest correlation. In the 1970s and 1980s when 16 of those 20 years were under Republican administrations, the crime rate in the US soared. The crime decline of the 1990s and the current murder nosedive are under Democratic administrations.

The current dip is despite the number of police officers being the same or just slightly down.

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. The end of the emergency phase of the coronavirus pandemic may also be contributing to the decline in murder.

The murder rate went up during the COVID-19 emergency. Perhaps that's another result of Donald Trump's botched handling of the pandemic.

It's been finally dawning on people that Republicans aren't great for the economy. Eventually it may also become conventional wisdom that the GOP is bad for public safety.

When the de facto leader of the Republican Party is an indicted lying crook with the mindset of a petty mobster, that sends a message to American society that such behavior is acceptable. No wonder criminal behavior is down since Trump's departure from office.