US on Track for Historically Low Homicide Rate, Report Finds

The United States is on pace to record its lowest homicide rate in over a century, according to a new report from the Council on Criminal Justice that documents an 18% decline in killings across 30 American cities during the first half of 2026 compared to the same period last year.

Data collected from police departments in cities including New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago showed approximately 215 fewer homicides in the first six months of 2026 than in the first half of 2025. If the trend holds through year-end, the annual homicide rate would reach levels not seen since reliable national record-keeping began in 1900, according to the report by the nonpartisan think tank.

A Broad, Sustained Decline

The mid-year update from CCJ researchers Ernesto Lopez and Bobby Boxerman tracked 13 crime categories across up to 36 large U.S. cities and found that nine of those categories recorded drops. Carjackings saw the steepest decline, plummeting 47% compared to the first half of 2025. Residential burglaries fell 13%, robberies dropped 17%, and motor vehicle thefts decreased 20%.

Violent crime overall is now at or below pre-pandemic levels. Compared to the first half of 2019, homicides are down 31%, robberies have fallen 41%, and carjackings are 51% lower. Four offenses — homicide, carjacking, residential burglary, and motor vehicle theft — have each dropped by 50% or more from their peak levels over the past nine years.

“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,” Adam Gelb, president and CEO of the Council on Criminal Justice, told AP News.

Why Crime Is Falling

Experts caution there is no single explanation for the historic decline, which began slowly in the second half of 2022 and accelerated through 2023, 2024, and 2025. The consistency of the trend across cities with vastly different political leadership and policing strategies suggests broad national forces are at work.

James Tuttle, a professor of sociology and criminology at the University of Montana, wrote in The Conversation that homicide rates have moved in near lockstep with drug overdoses, alcohol consumption, and firearm purchases over the past decade. As the opioid and fentanyl crisis has waned, alcohol abuse has declined from pandemic peaks, and gun sales have fallen from record levels seen in 2020-2021, the murder rate has followed suit.

“Local policies and programs surely matter, but the striking consistency of the decline suggests that macro-level forces are exerting enormous influence as well,” Gelb told CBS News. He pointed to technology reshaping daily life and keeping more people at home, as well as decreased alcohol abuse, as potential contributing factors.

Gelb also noted that the lethality of violent crime — the share of serious violent incidents that prove fatal — has dropped 23% across a sample of 17 cities, meaning that even when violent encounters occur, they are less likely to end in death.

Uneven Progress Across Cities

While the national trend is overwhelmingly positive, the report highlights significant variation at the local level. Twenty-one of the 30 cities surveyed saw homicide decreases, with Lincoln, Nebraska, recording a 100% drop (from six murders to zero), Rochester, New York, falling 76%, and Little Rock, Arkansas, dropping 61%.

However, eight cities bucked the trend. Norfolk, Virginia, experienced a 64% increase in homicides. San Francisco saw a 55% rise, though Jeff Asher, co-founder of the data analytics firm AH Datalytics, noted that the city “had the fewest murders since 1941 last year, so this is an increase from a very low level.” Dallas recorded a 30% increase, and Austin saw a 9% rise.

John Roman, director of the Center on Public Safety and Justice at NORC at the University of Chicago, told AP News that conservative politicians may point to immigration crackdowns and National Guard deployments as drivers of the decline, while liberals may credit Biden-era gun safety legislation. But Roman emphasized that the best explanations “transcend specific administrations,” pointing instead to decreased drug usage and federal funding for social programs that support at-risk youth.

Areas of Concern

Not all crime categories are improving. Drug offenses rose 12% compared to the first half of 2025, domestic violence increased 8%, shoplifting climbed 4%, and sexual assaults were up 3%. However, drug offenses remain 15% below pre-pandemic levels, and domestic violence is 7% lower than in 2019.

The report’s authors explicitly state that their findings “are not evidence of the success or failure of any policy or practice; it simply documents recent crime trends from a sample of large U.S. cities.”

What’s Next

The Council on Criminal Justice is convening a two-day summit in September 2026, bringing together researchers from criminology, economics, psychology, sociology, and public health to study the drivers of the homicide decline. The council has also commissioned a series of research briefs examining more than a dozen potential contributing factors.

“This is one of the most significant public safety developments in decades,” Gelb said. “It means lives are being saved, families are spared trauma and communities are regaining stability.”

The FBI is expected to release final 2025 crime statistics that will confirm or adjust the projected historic low, while year-end 2026 data will determine whether the mid-year trends hold through the full calendar year.