Data collected from 30 American cities showed an 18% decrease in the homicide rate from 2025 compared with the same period in 2026, translating to about 215 fewer homicides this year, according to a new report from the independent Council on Criminal Justice. The report, released Thursday, said that if the trend continues, the annual homicide rate would fall to the lowest levels in over a century once final numbers are released at the end of the year.
Who Gets Counted, Who Gets Controlled
The numbers come from a system that tracks violence city by city, crime by crime, while the people living under it keep absorbing the consequences. The report tracked 13 crimes and recorded drops in nine categories, including carjackings, residential burglary and aggravated assaults. It also showed small increases in shoplifting, domestic violence incidents, sexual assaults and drug offenses over the same period between 2025 and 2026. The council said some report categories include data from as many as 36 cities, while others include fewer cities because of tracking gaps or differences in definitions for specific crimes.
That’s the apparatus at work: partial data, uneven coverage, and a national picture assembled from fractured local systems. The report’s own limits matter. Some cities are counted, some aren’t, and the definitions shift depending on the crime. The people most affected by violence, theft, and policing don’t get a neat spreadsheet. They get the mess.
Adam Gelb, the president and CEO of the Council on Criminal Justice, said, "Murder and other crime rates are falling across the map in cities with different political leadership, different housing and economic conditions, different policing and prosecution and violence reduction strategies and different levels of federal enforcement activity." He also said, "This is one of the most significant public safety developments in decades. It means lives are being saved, families are spared trauma and communities are regaining stability."
The Reform Machine and Its Limits
Gelb’s remarks point straight at the usual menu of managed responses: different political leadership, different policing and prosecution strategies, different levels of federal enforcement activity. The state changes uniforms, slogans, and tactics. The hierarchy stays in place. Even the report’s own framing shows how public safety gets filtered through institutions that claim authority over everyone else.
John Roman, director of the Center on Public Safety and Justice at the National Opinion Research Center from the University of Chicago, said there are many factors that could explain why one location sees increases or decreases when another does not. He said conservative politicians affiliated with President Donald Trump will point to intensified immigration crackdowns and the deployment of the National Guard in cities like Los Angeles and Memphis, while liberal politicians might point to former Democratic President Joe Biden's public safety legislation that strengthened background checks on firearm sales. Roman said the best explanations transcend specific administrations and include decreased drug usage, fewer purchases from illegal markets and an influx of federal funding for localities after the pandemic that was spent on social programming.
That’s the election trap in plain sight. One side points to crackdowns and troops. The other points to legislation and background checks. Both stay inside the same cage, arguing over which manager gets to run it. Roman’s own explanation goes elsewhere, toward social programming funded after the pandemic, not the theater of partisan blame.
What People Actually Did
Roman said those programs often funded jobs like teachers and social workers who primarily work with "young people who are the highest risk of violence and victimization." That’s the closest thing in the report to a grassroots answer, though it still runs through federal funding and local institutions. The money didn’t appear from nowhere. It was spent on social programming, and those programs paid for teachers and social workers who dealt with young people at the sharp end of violence.
The report said a significant number of violent crimes were less deadly, with a 23% drop in the lethality of the crimes committed, measured by the share of serious violent crime that is fatal. It also said residential burglaries fell 13% year over year and 50% compared with pre-pandemic levels in 2019. Shoplifting rose 5%, and drug offenses were still lower than pre-pandemic levels.
Roughly a third of the 30 sampled cities defied the average homicide decline, recording an increase in deadly violence from the first half of 2025 to the same period in 2026. Norfolk, Virginia, saw a 64% increase in homicides, and San Francisco saw a 55% increase. Only Norfolk, Austin, Pittsburgh and Minneapolis had more homicides in 2026 than in the same period in 2019.
So the headline number drops. The suffering doesn’t vanish. Some cities see fewer killings, others see more, and the machinery of enforcement, prosecution, and federal funding keeps grinding on while officials claim credit for stability they didn’t create. The report says lives are being saved. The same report also shows how uneven, conditional, and institution-bound that saving really is.