Crime Trends in U.S. Cities:
Year-End 2024 Update

This study is the fourteenth in a series of reports for CCJ exploring crime patterns since the emergence of the coronavirus pandemic and establishment of the Council’s National Commission on COVID-19 and Criminal Justice. Updating the earlier analyses, this study reveals a mix of increases and decreases in crime rates across a sample of U.S. cities through December 2024.

Overall, the findings suggest that most offenses in the sample cities are near or below 2019 levels. Homicide, the most serious of the crimes, has fallen to 6% below 2019 rates across the sample, though many cities are still experiencing high rates of murder. This study shows that the homicide drop has been driven partly by cities with traditionally high homicide rates experiencing large declines and returning to levels not seen in about a decade. This trend is promising but should be viewed as preliminary, given that it is based on a sample of cities because national-level data are not yet available. Moreover, if the national homicide rate were to fall back to pre-pandemic, 2019 levels, that rate (5.2 per 100,000 U.S. residents) was 15% higher than the 2014 rate (4.5 per 100,000), which was the lowest since World War II.⁵ While a 5.2 per 100,000 homicide rate is roughly half the modern peak of 9.8 recorded in 1991, this progress is of little comfort to families who lose loved ones to violence. Even with homicide dropping to levels more typical for the U.S., the nation and its individual states still have rates that are high compared to other industrialized nations.

As we welcome the decline of most crime types to 2019 levels, it’s important to recognize that such progress was far from guaranteed. As noted in a prior Council report, the homicide rate was 32.5% higher in the first two months of 2020 compared to 2019, before COVID-19 restrictions and summer protests. Additionally, a recent study of gun fatalities using national public health data identified an upward shift that began in October 2019.⁶ While there has been variation in city trends over time, there has also been variation in individual-level victimization. Black youth (ages 15 to 24) experienced substantial increases in fatal firearm victimization during the pandemic,⁷ and Black Americans continued to experience non-fatal violent victimization through 2023, when White and Hispanic victimization was falling.

While reported rates of some crimes, such as carjacking and motor vehicle theft, have dropped significantly in the past year, they remain above 2019 levels. Reported incidents of shoplifting, a crime that has received enormous attention in state capitols, Congress, and the media, dropped abruptly early in the pandemic as stores closed during COVID lockdowns, but have now increased back to 2019 levels. By contrast, sexual assault, robbery, residential burglary, and drug offenses in 2024 were at least 19% below 2019 levels.

The return to pre-pandemic levels seen for many offenses should not slow our nation’s efforts to reduce crime. Many communities continue to suffer from disturbingly high rates of violence, and evidence-based crime reduction strategies are still urgently needed. This is also a time when investment is warranted to help us better understand the changing crime landscape and craft effective crime control approaches for the present and the future. The Council’s Crime Trends Working Group identified key gaps in criminal justice data, including non-fatal gun violence, white-collar, environmental, and cybercrimes, and produced a set of actionable recommendations for policymakers to close those gaps.

Along with improvements in crime data, continuing research on crime trends is essential to accelerate progress and bring crime down to all-time lows. While the study of historical crime trends remains important, society has experienced large shifts in new directions, especially becoming increasingly digital, since the crime drop of the late 1990s.⁸ Analyzing these and other changes can help us better understand the dynamics driving today’s crime patterns and identify the policies and practices most likely to make our communities safer. For instance, there is a general concern that the increased use of social media by youth has contributed to an increase in youth violence.⁹ Nevertheless, aggregate trends suggest that overall juvenile crime is down, and some of the decline may have been driven by reduced substance use and decreased informal socialization by juveniles (e.g., going to parties).

Crucially, understanding recent crime trends is not a purely academic exercise. Beyond crime’s direct consequences for victims and survivors, its societal costs are immense, reminding us that even during periods of declining crime, efforts to reduce harm must remain a priority.