Economist Writing Every Day

The tragic act of terrorism in New Orleans early on New Year’s Day might seem like confirmation to many that crime, especially in big cities, is still at elevated levels from before the pandemic. But we have to be very careful with anecdotes, no matter how deadly and visible.

Using data from the New Orleans Police Department dashboard, which has been updated through December 31, 2024, we see that 2024 had the lowest number of homicides going back to 2011, which likely makes it one of the safest years on record in New Orleans:

New Orleans is not alone.

Using data from the Real Time Crime Index, we see that among the 10 largest cities in the US in their index, through the first 10 months of the 2024 (the most recent available for all these cities), homicides are down 16.9% compared to 2023.

Murders in these 10 largest cities are still about 5.6% above the first 10 months of 2019, but three of the 10 cities (Dallas, Philadelphia, and San Diego) are already below the first 10 months of 2019, by fairly significant margins (-13.7%, -26.2%, and -21.6%). Once we have all 12 months of data for these cities, I suspect that a few more will be back to 2019 levels.

Crime is indeed still a major social problem in much of the US, but we are getting back to 2019 levels of social problems — which is still bad, but violent crime is not high and rising, as many seem to believe based on very notable and horrific events.

(The 10 largest cities in the RT Crime Index are Chicago, Dallas, Houston, Las Vegas, Los Angeles, New York, Philadelphia, Phoenix, San Antonio, and San Diego.)