No mention of Atlanta because we will still shoot you in the a** if you step over the line.
Homicides Are Falling in Major American Cities
Local officials say pandemic factors that drove up murder rates are receding
Zusha Elinson
Updated June 8, 2023 2:40 pm ET
Homicides in some of America’s largest cities are falling after soaring during the first two years of the pandemic.
So far this year, killings are down 12% overall in nine of the 10 most populous cities compared with the same time frame last year, according to local government data.
Homicides are down in six of those cities, including 27% in Los Angeles, 22% in Houston, and 16% in Philadelphia. In Texas, the cities of Dallas, San Antonio and Austin reported slight upticks. San Diego didn’t provide data.
Advertisement - Scroll to Continue
The 2023 data available from the cities had different end dates, ranging from April to this week.
Newsletter Sign-up
What’s News
Catch up on the headlines, understand the news and make better decisions, free in your inbox every day.
Local officials and criminologists say conditions that drove the violence up in 2020 and 2021, such as rise in domestic disputes and a pause in gang-violence prevention programs during the pandemic, as well as a pullback in police enforcement after racial-justice protests over the murder of George Floyd, are receding.
Last year, the number of killings dropped 5% in 70 of the largest U.S. cities from 2021, according to the Major Cities Chiefs Association, which represents police chiefs from large cities.
“Obviously, things got so bad, we’re slowly chipping away at it,” said Danielle Outlaw, Philadelphia’s police commissioner.
Advertisement - Scroll to Continue
Philadelphia reported a record 562 homicides in 2021. Outlaw said the closing of courts and schools during the early days of the Covid-19 pandemic and the wave of protests calling to defund police departments affected policing.
“The narrative was defund and abolish,” she said. “That narrative undermined our credibility and authority.”
This year, drug-related killings are down 56% and domestic homicides are down 22% in Philadelphia. Outlaw credited a new team of detectives that investigates all shootings, as well as the return of community anti-violence groups and regular schooling. She said police morale is up with more public support.
The Federal Bureau of Investigation isn’t expected to release national crime figures for 2022 until later this year. Murders rose 4% in 2021 after spiking by nearly 30% in 2020, according to the agency’s most recent data.
Advertisement - Scroll to Continue
Some criminologists argue that the reduction in violence is tied most closely to the receding effects of the pandemic. John Roman, a senior fellow in the Economics, Justice and Society Group at NORC at the University of Chicago, said Americans were disconnected from schools, churches, mentors and counseling, which resulted in more deadly conflicts. He said that any impacts on policing from the protests weren’t widespread.
Houston is another city that has seen a decline in homicides compared with the same time in 2022. Photo: Mark Felix/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images
“The pandemic was everywhere all the time all at once and the protest was a moment in time and in a limited number of places,” Roman said.
As homicides have fallen, other crimes have increased in many cities over the past two years such as robberies and retail thefts. Criminologists have attributed this to the reopening of stores and to more foot traffic in cities after pandemic shutdowns ended.
In Houston, Mayor Sylvester Turner looks at the city’s homicide numbers every morning. When he began this practice in the early days of the pandemic, he noticed a rise in homicides related to domestic violence.
Advertisement - Scroll to Continue
“People were in isolation, people were working from home, being at home in close proximity with each other pent up,” Turner said.
This year, domestic homicides have dropped along with every other category, he said.
SHARE YOUR THOUGHTS
Which policies do you think are most effective at reducing violence in cities? Join the conversation below.
Turner said he is optimistic that cities such as his can continue to bring down killings to prepandemic levels.
“You need to do everything that you can, utilize every tool in your toolbox, give law enforcement the resources they need and invest heavily in the community and on top of that you just need a bit of good luck,” he said.
Deputy Chief Kris Pitcher, who oversees the Los Angeles Police Department’s detectives, attributed the decline in murders in his city in part to officers’ efforts to target illegal guns. During the pandemic, there was a rise in stolen and trafficked firearms.
Advertisement - Scroll to Continue
Teams of officers that in the past focused on narcotics were ordered to expand their investigations to include illegal gun sales, he said.
Pitcher also pointed to the return of intervention workers whose job is to tamp down gang feuds that can spiral into retaliatory shootings.
Los Angeles, the birthplace of gangs such as the Bloods and Crips, has used a combination of intervention programs and a surgical approach to violent crime by police to turn the city from one of the most dangerous in the 1990s to one of the safest in the 2010s.
The pandemic halted many of those efforts. The city’s gang-intervention program, which started in 2007 and has turned hundreds of former gang members into neighborhood peacekeepers, had trouble reaching gang members.
Gatherings where interventionists tried to head off revenge shootings, like funerals or city-sponsored events in the parks, vanished. Gang shootings rose.
For the past two years, those shootings have trended downward in Los Angeles, Pitcher said.
“Everyone is up and running again,” he said. “The interventionists are on call 24-7.”
Write to Zusha Elinson at
[email protected]
Advertisement - Scroll to Continue
You almost start to feel sorry for this FBI guy. He just had is ass handed to him and he knew it.