Homicide Trends Before and After the COVID-19 Pandemic

• In Event: Trends & Patterns in Violent Crime

Abstract

Since summer 2020, the Council on Criminal Justice has produced regular reports analyzing crime trends, focusing on patterns in violent and property crime across approximately major U.S. cities. These reports offer critical insights to guide public debate and policymaking on crime and community safety. After a historic homicide increase from 2019 to 2020, cities with traditionally higher homicide levels experienced larger homicide decreases beginning in 2023, on average, than cities with lower homicide rates. These trends continued throughout 2024. In some cases, these large declines resulted in traditionally high homicide cities returned or experienced lower rates than the year before the pandemic began. This paper extends this work by using group-based trajectory modeling to examine variation in national trends using a larger sample. Preliminary descriptive results using data from the FBI’s Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR) Program show that cities (> 100,000 population) in the top 25% of homicide rates for 2010 to 2018 experienced an average 40% increase from 2019 to 2020 and a 6% decrease from 2022 to 2023. Cities in the bottom 25% experienced a 22% increase from 2019 to 2020 and a 2% decrease from 2022 to 2023.

Author

• Ernesto Lopez, Council on Criminal Justice / University of Missouri St. Louis