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"Remarkable": Despite GOP fear-mongering, experts say new crime data shows US "safest" in decades
"If you are under 50, you may well be living in the safest America you've ever lived in"
Despite GOP fear-mongering, crime data shows US "safest" in decades
"If you are under 50, you may well be living in the safest America you've ever lived in."
www.salon.com
Fifty-four of the 69 cities included in the MCCA data set saw drops in violent crime in the first half of the year, per the Axios review, with some communities seeing more than a 25 percent decline. Columbus, Ohio, saw the nation's largest dip at 41 percent so far, while Omaha, Nebraska, followed with a 30 percent decrease.
Miami, Fla., and Washington, D.C. both had 29 percent declines in violent crime, and Austin, Texas and New Orleans, saw 28 percent and 26 percent decreases respectively.
While the FBI Uniform Crime report points to a similarly significant drop in overall violent crime for the first quarter of the year — showing a 15.2 percent decrease between January and March 2024 compared to the same period in 2023 — other preliminary data sets from NORC at the University of Chicago, AHDatalytics and the Council of Criminal Justice released this summer released data instead outlining percentage decreases specific to different types of violent crime.
John Roman, a senior fellow at NORC, told Salon that most criminologists home in on the homicide numbers to determine crime rates because local and state jurisdictions' reports of homicides are far more consistent and robust than with other types of violent crime.
That focus is in part because of changes in the way cities report crime to the FBI that took effect in 2021, he explained, noting that cities report data voluntarily. Violent crime reporting compliance was at 95 percent before the FBI began requiring incident-level data, but dropped to less than 60 percent afterward, he said. While the percentage of compliance has risen back into the 80s, Roman said homicide data is more reliable.
The MCCA data found that the number of homicides in the 69 reported cities dropped by more than 17 percent between the first six months of this year and the same period of 2023. Boston, Mass., saw a massive 78 percent drop in homicides, while Philadelphia experienced a 42 percent decrease in homicides.
The homicide numbers from the other organizations followed a similar arc, with NORC reporting a 23 percent decrease in the homicide rate, AHDatalytics recording a 17.7 percent drop, and the CCJ noting a 13 percent decline.
"It's a remarkable thing. The homicide rates from each of these groups shows a rate that is below the pre-pandemic levels — that are below 2019 — and they're approaching the lowest levels we've seen since 1960," Roman said. "That would suggest that, if you are under 50, you may well be living in the safest America you've ever lived in."
Should that downtrend hold through the rest of the year, he added, it will amount to the "largest decline in violence that America has seen since we started tracking it."