The Atlantic

The Murder Rate Is Suddenly Falling

The first five months of 2023 have produced an encouraging overall trend for the first time in years.
Source: Illustration by Ben Kothe / The Atlantic

Official crime statistics are only released after a substantial delay, so for nearly a decade I’ve collected and compiled big-city crime data as a way to assemble a more real-time picture of national murder trends. And this spring, I’ve found something that I’ve never seen before and that probably has not happened in decades: strong evidence of a sharp and broad decline in the nation’s murder rate.

The United States may be experiencing one of the largest annual percent changes in murder ever recorded, according to my preliminary data. It is still early in the year and

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