Where things are going right.
Since the spike in gun violence before and during the COVID-19 pandemic, the nation as a whole has reciprocally experienced a significant decline. While this national trend has been widely reported, little has been discussed about whether or not these declines are being felt evenly across the nation, and in particular in America’s largest cities.
Last year, a few cities, such as Cleveland, Memphis and Stockton, Calif., suffered significant increases in gun violence. And perhaps more notably, a few with former reputations as hotbeds of crime — like Baltimore, Philadelphia and Detroit — saw especially sizable drops. It’s imperative for those of us who study crime to try to better understand the driving forces behind these improvements in public safety when and where they occur. That’s the only way to give intelligent guidance to policymakers about how to protect people in cities.
The Gun Violence Archive documents more than 223,000 fatal and nonfatal firearm incidents from the first week of July 2021, at which point crime data show homicides began to steadily decline, through the final week of 2023. We broke this incident data down by city to try to identify patterns of gun violence and see which cities, on average, trended similarly to one another.
By examining variation in gun violence across cities and over time, the modeling strategy we used identified statistically distinct groups of cities based on how similarly they trended together over the recovery period — based on the magnitude of the decline and the shape of the trajectory over time. In all, five unique groups of cities experienced differences in gun violence, with some experiencing spikes while others did not, thereby demonstrating that the gun violence trends after the COVID-19 spike were not similarly experienced by many of the nation’s largest cities.
The results of our analysis point to some notable findings over this multiyear period. One group of cities, which included Detroit and St. Louis (shown as Group 4 in the figure), saw the largest decline in their population-adjusted 12-month rolling average gun violence victimization rate during the study period, going from 43.33 victimizations per 100,000 residents in July 2021 to 21.04 victimizations per 100,000 residents by end of December 2023 — a 51.4% decline. The group that saw the largest increase included Cleveland, Memphis and Stockton, Calif. (shown as Group 3), together going from 24.55 victimizations per 100,000 residents in July 2021 to 34.60 victimizations per 100,000 residents by end of December 2023 — a 40.9% increase. Cities such as Tampa, Boston and Austin (Shown as Group 1), did not experience much of the kinds of erratic (up or down) changes experienced by other cities and tended to have relatively low and stable levels of gun victimization.
Throughout 2024, the declines continued nationwide and several large cities made national headlines with respect to their significant year-over-year declines. For example, Boston recorded its lowest number of homicides since 1957, with 24 in 2024. Baltimore saw a 23% decrease in homicides, from 2023 (262) to 2024 (201); a 25% drop in nonfatal violent crimes, from 1,190 in 2023 to 891 in 2024; and a 35% decrease in nonfatal shootings, from 635 in 2023 to 415 in 2024. Philadelphia witnessed its largest annual decline in homicides in almost 50 years, with 268 people killed in 2024, down 35% from the previous year. Shootings also declined in the city. Detroit, one of the two cities in our analysis that showed a very large recovery from pandemic highs, continued its double-digit postpandemic decrease in murders (down 19% in 2024 compared to 2023 and 33% compared to 2022), nonfatal shootings and other violent crimes. Detroit has reached its lowest homicide rate since 1969.
Why may these cities be witnessing such steep drops? We should approach this question with humility — indeed, even the causes of New York City’s great crime decline of the 1990s are still subject to debate. But we can engage in some well-informed speculation.
Philadelphia witnessed its largest annual decline in homicides in almost 50 years, with 268 people killed in 2024, down 35% from the previous year.
All these cities have credited an array of factors, including, for example, a focus on addressing persons and places at higher risks of violence, enforcement of gun crimes, the expansion of grassroots community programs and community-based nonprofits, police deployment at hot spots of crime and a focus on addressing violent persons and violent areas. More generally, these cities have adopted a comprehensive multiagency, multipronged partnership that adopts a public health approach to violence prevention, engaging a wide range of partners from the police department to federal partners to public health officials to community violence interruption.
Detroit leaders, for example, credit a coordinated partnership between government and community agencies. These included a range of strategies from the Detroit Police Department: recruitment and retention of officers, new neighborhood response teams, expanded use of scanners to detect illegal weapon carrying. They also relied on a federal partnership — between the U.S. Attorney; the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives; and the Drug Enforcement Administration — to coordinate increased enforcement of gun crimes, and on new county partnerships that included apprehension of those with felony warrants (especially for gun crimes), reduction in pending homicide warrants and filling vacant sheriff’s positions. And they extended to court partnerships aimed at reducing the backlog of felony gun cases, to state partnerships aimed at high-risk individuals on probation and parole, to Gov. Gretchen Whitmer’s funding of new staff to neighborhood officer and mental health units to extend proactive efforts to prevent gun violence. Finally, they drew on a range of community partnerships, including the Police Department’s partnership with Detroit Wayne Integrated Health Network to develop a co-response protocol designed to de-escalate situations and prevent individuals from harming themselves or others.
Continuing on the theme of successful, coordinated interagency partnerships, Bakersfield, Calif., is also worth highlighting. Responding to rising gun violence, the city initiated its Gun Violence Reduction Strategy (GVRS) in 2020, which, among its core tenets, emphasizes the need for great transparency and coordination between law enforcement, hospitals and trauma centers, and community-based violence intervention partners. City leaders credit this strategy for much of the success they’ve seen in bringing gun violence down in the subsequent years. Through the end of August 2024, gun victimizations in Bakersfield were down almost 40% compared to the same period in 2023 — one of the most significant declines of any major city last year.
These are great citywide case studies, but cities have not just acted on their own. Many of the cities experiencing the largest declines in gun violence were also able to successfully leverage federal funds from the American Rescue Plan and the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act to expand community-led violence intervention programs. These sources of federal funding will expire at the end of 2025 and unless local, state and federal lawmakers make additional investments in prevention. Many effective programs will shut down, risking the progress made in recent years. Now more than ever, we should heed the call of public health experts, including the U.S. Surgeon General and the dean of the Yale School of Public Health, and double down on the short-, medium- and long-term strategies that work together to prevent crime. Every day is an opportunity for prevention.