If you believe the Republican Party’s telling, we live in an America where violent crime in general – and gun homicides in particular – are escalating, unchecked, destroying our cities.
“Crime is rising. Pennsylvanians are less safe,” says a flyer that the dark money group Securing American Greatness sent to voters in the commonwealth in October, featuring images of crime scene tape and Kamala Harris’s face.
“The crime is so out of control in our country,” former President Donald Trump told the crowd at an August campaign event in Michigan. In cities led by Democrats, he said: “It’s just insane. But you can’t walk across the street to get a loaf of bread. You get shot, you get mugged, you get raped, you get whatever it may be.”
But these claims are false: Cities across the United States have seen significant decreases in gun homicides this year, following large drops last year. Some, like Baltimore and Detroit, have reached record lows.
A Trace analysis of Gun Violence Archive data found that shooting deaths through the end of October are down more than 10 percent from last year. And, perhaps ironically, the decreases seem to be most pronounced in the Democratic-run large cities with substantial nonwhite populations and histories of elevated gun violence that the Trump campaign has been painting as out of control.
Indeed, 17 of the 20 cities with the biggest year-to-date decreases in shooting deaths from last year are in that category. The remaining three have Republican mayors.
“Crime is down across the board at unprecedented rates,” said John Roman, director of the Center on Public Safety and Justice at the University of Chicago.
“The biggest declines seem to be in homicide and motor vehicle theft,” Roman said. “Gun violence is driving the homicide numbers. Gun violence has declined at an unprecedented rate.”
These decreases, however, were preceded by years of bloodshed in the form of record-setting numbers of gun deaths, concentrated in the very cities and neighborhoods that are now seeing such steep declines.
From 2014 to 2019, U.S. gun violence rates — already the highest in the developed world — were rising slowly and generally steadily. Community members and public health experts were trying to raise the alarm and access resources to combat the problem.
Then, 2020 exploded everything.
In the very early months of that year, as the world was just learning about COVID-19, gun violence first decreased. But in March, as the first closings and lockdowns kicked in, deadly shootings increased dramatically. Then, protests over the killing of George Floyd, and in favor of racial justice, began at the end of May and gun deaths increased further. In all, nonsuicide gun deaths increased 26 percent between 2019 and 2020, according to the Gun Violence Archive.
During all of this, Americans were going out and buying a lot of guns. There was a spike in sales when it became clear that COVID would disrupt life as we knew it. There was an even bigger spike when racial justice protests crested a few months later, and then a final spike — slightly smaller than the other two — when the U.S. Capitol was attacked on January 6, 2021, according to The Trace’s Gun Sales Tracker.
Nearly 22 million handguns and long guns were sold in 2020, the highest number per year on record, and though the pandemic may have wound down, those deadly weapons are still with us.
Just as it seemed that the elevated rate of gun deaths was the new normal, they decreased in 2023. While complete numbers are not yet available for 2024, that drop seems to have accelerated.
Some communities like Baltimore and Philadelphia are seeing record lows, and many others are returning to roughly the level of gun violence they endured before 2020.
Crime is down across the board at unprecedented rates
John Roman, director of the University of Chicago’s Center on Public Safety and Justice
The debate over why this happened has also made its way into the realm of politics.
The version of the story promulgated by Trump and his allies is this: When the Black Lives Matter movement reached its zenith, police found themselves under unprecedented scrutiny. Certain neighborhoods were so hostile that they stopped policing there, leading to a huge spike in crime.
“They’ve taken away the dignity and the spirit and the life of some of these police officers,” Trump told the crowd in Michigan. “We have police in various areas that are pretty rough areas. If they do their job, if they’re diligent in doing their job, they go after the police officer rather than the criminal. They lose their house, they lose their pension, they lose their family, they lose everything.”
De-policing was real, said Justin Nix, a professor at the University of Nebraska-Omaha’s School of Criminology and Criminal Justice. A study he did of Denver found that police made 11,150 fewer pedestrian stops and almost 40,000 fewer vehicle stops in 2020. He also found that those decreases were concentrated in “disadvantaged and impoverished neighborhoods” — precisely the places where shootings are statistically most likely to occur.
There’s also evidence that policing has ramped back up, Nix said, which could explain some decreases in shootings. But he said he doubts that more policing can fully explain the magnitude of decreases we are seeing in 2024.
De-policing as an explanation “deserves a seat at the table,” he said. “But it’s not the full explanation.”
While these changes in policing were happening, another significant change was underway in many communities.
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The Bipartisan Safer Communities Act, which became law in 2022, appropriated $250 million for community violence interventions. These are programs designed to prevent gun violence before it happens by mediating conflict, offering resources like mental health care to people who are likely to be perpetrators or victims of gun violence in the future, and connecting gunshot victims to support when they go to the hospital.
The White House says it disbursed $94 million in awards for fiscal years 2022 and 2023 and will distribute $70 million more in fiscal year 2024.
In addition, many states and localities spent funds from the American Recovery Plan Act on efforts to reduce community violence. Atlanta, for example, spent $5 million on street mediators who can be deployed to conflicts and de-escalate them.
Much of this spending has been directed toward the very neighborhoods that had high crime to begin with, saw a large spike in gun homicides, and are now seeing steep declines.
“These are really historically big investments,” said Roman, of the University of Chicago. “To think that all the investment had no effect strikes me as unreasonable. If you put enough resources into something that’s based on evidence, you should see some effects.”
Michael McBride is the executive director of LIVE FREE USA, an organization that runs several community violence interruption programs and helps local people raise money for such work.
“Police always want to take credit when crime goes down, but not the blame when crime goes up,” said McBride, a clergyman from San Francisco who goes by “Pastor Mike.”
What communities affected by gun violence need, he said, are alternatives to policing. “Violence is a public health issue, with the right kind of outreach and wraparound services you can facilitate peaceful resolution to conflicts without having to throw everybody in jail,” McBride said. “I think we’re winning, and I think we’re changing people’s minds and hearts about how you secure public safety.”
To be sure, there are also notable exceptions to the general trend of decreasing gun violence, in which shootings deaths are increasing or flat.
“There are ample cities where homicide is up,” Roman said. “Gun violence in particular is a very local phenomenon. It’s affected by macro trends, but also the reality of life on a few blocks of those cities.”
If the voting public isn’t more aware of the actual trajectory of gun violence, perhaps it’s because no one wants to declare the problem solved. Even though gun deaths have decreased in Philadelphia this year, guns have killed nearly five people per week in the city on average.
“One of the big mistakes I’ve seen is as soon as there’s a reduction people start to literally defund violence prevention efforts,” McBride said. “It’s not going to be solved in one administration. Gun violence is as American as apple pie.”
“Our success ought not be a reason for our divestment,” he added.
Also, one data point does not make a trend, said Cassandra Crifasi, co-director of the Center for Gun Violence Solutions at Johns Hopkins University.
“The important thing is the job’s not done,” Crifasi said. “We’re still well above where we were, even just a few years ago before COVID-19.”
“Anyone who says ‘let’s move on to something else,’” she said, “truly doesn’t understand what a public health crisis this is.”
The data used in this story was assembled through a thorough analysis. Read our methodology here.
If you are a newsroom interested in having gun violence data localized for your area, please be in touch: [email protected].
