The number of murders committed in the United States in 2023 registered the largest year-over-year decline in the more than six decades that the Federal Bureau of Investigation has maintained formal data, the agency said Monday, after violent crime rates soared during the pandemic.
FBI data showed an estimated murder rate of 5.7 per 100,000 residents, a more than 16% decline from 2020 and an 11.6% drop from 2022. That decline represents 2,500 fewer murder victims in 2023 compared with the year before, according to Jeff Asher, a New Orleans-based analyst who monitors crime rates.
Asher found the number of murders dropped in cities such as New Orleans, New York and Los Angeles, but it increased in Washington, D.C., as well as in cities including Memphis, Tenn.
“Taking the 2023 decline alongside the even bigger decline we are seeing so far in 2024 puts the U.S. murder rate at or very possibly below pre-COVID levels in the span of [three] years,” Asher wrote in an analysis.
Murder rates fell in 45 states, according to the FBI. The worst outlier was Maine, where murder rates nearly doubled between 2022 and 2023 — a difference attributable entirely to a single incident, in which a man shot and killed 18 people in Lewiston in October 2023 in the most devastating mass shooting in state history.
Overall violent crime rates fell by 3%, according to the FBI data. Violent crime rates in 2023 were virtually identical to low rates registered in 2014 and 2019, when violent crime reached its lowest rate since 1970.
Property crime rates were largely flat, though burglaries and theft have dropped substantially. The rate of burglaries is the lowest the FBI has registered since it began tracking data in 1965.
But auto thefts continue to rise, up 12% over the last year and up a whopping 44% from pre-pandemic levels registered in 2019. While crime analysts see reason to believe that vehicle thefts are plateauing and may even be declining, it is the one area in which crime rates are rising.
The FBI collects crime data through the Uniform Crime Reporting Program, which works with more than 16,000 law enforcement agencies at the state, county, city, university and tribal levels. Reporting agencies covered an estimated 95% of the U.S. population in 2023, the FBI said in a press release.
Though former President Donald Trump has made crime and law enforcement a cornerstone of his presidential campaign, the FBI data points to a nation that is markedly safer than it was just a few decades ago.
There were about 5,000 fewer homicides committed in 2023 than there were in the early years of the 1990s, when the United States had about 90 million fewer residents than today. The rate of murders stands at a little more than half what it was in 1991.
Violent crime has fallen by about the same share: There were 758 violent crimes committed per 100,000 Americans in 1991, the highest the FBI ever recorded; today, that rate is just under 364 per 100,000. The rate of property crimes has fallen by about 60% since the peak in 1980.