The FBI’s data is based on reporting from thousands of law enforcement agencies across the United States. The data released on Monday came after what had been a painful stretch in many places, with cities and communities struggling in recent years to contend with an increase in shootings and killings.
Rates of gun deaths climbed recently to their highest levels in decades, The Washington Post has reported, with a particularly sharp spike coming in the coronavirus pandemic’s first year. And some cities endured record-breaking numbers of homicides in 2020, only to see those numbers eclipsed in 2021. Experts say there was no single clear explanation for what drove that increase in bloodshed, though they said possible factors included the stress of the pandemic and the perpetually climbing number of guns in America.
More recently, even as cities still contend with ongoing gun violence, there have been positive signs in many places. Homicides declined in big cities across the country last year, which continues into this year. The FBI’s reporting on Monday echoed what some prior analyses and publicly available data for 2022 have shown on that front.
The Major Cities Chiefs Association, a group of policing leaders representing dozens of cities nationwide, reported an overall drop in homicides in 2022 from 2021. The Council on Criminal Justice, a nonpartisan group, released its own study in January examining major cities and found a decline in homicides and gun assaults in 2022. That study also noted a significant increase in motor vehicle thefts last year, mirroring a finding in the FBI’s data Monday.
In addition to finding a decline in reported murders and manslaughters, the FBI said rapes decreased by 5.4 percent and aggravated assaults fell by 1.1 percent. Robberies, meanwhile, rose 1.3 percent.
While reported violent crimes fell, reports of property crimes went up, the FBI said. The bureau said motor vehicle thefts climbed 10.9 percent and what it called “larceny-theft,” which generally means stealing property, rose 7.8 percent. Burglaries and breaking and entering, meanwhile, remained flat from the year before.
Car thefts are continuing to climb, with incidents this year on pace to surpass the figures seen in 2022, according to a Post database tracking such cases, which includes data from more than 90 police departments.
The FBI’s data also illustrated what a large role guns continue to play in American violence. According to the FBI data, for all cases where officials knew what type of weapon was involved in a reported violent crime, that weapon was most frequently a gun.
The FBI’s report Monday came as the bureau has pushed the country’s approximately 18,000 law enforcement agencies to shift how they submit data by switching to the National Incident-Based Reporting System (NIBRS). The FBI’s data for 2021 was collected solely through this method.
For 2022, however, the FBI said it also accepted information through another method — the Summary Reporting System (SRS) — to assemble what the bureau called “nationally representative data.” In total, more than 15,000 agencies submitted data, the FBI said, and this combined data covered more than 93 percent of the country’s population.
The data released Monday was “substantially improved” over what the bureau released for 2021, adding “a level of certainty that we didn’t have” that year, said Jeff Asher, a crime analyst and consultant.
The FBI’s data released Monday focused on last year and how it related to previous years. So far this year, homicides have continued to fall in many major cities.
Through Sunday, there were 344 homicides in Philadelphia this year, down from 430 on the same date a year earlier, according to police data. In Chicago, police data show, there were 480 homicides through Oct. 8, down from 538 on the same date a year earlier.
In New York City, police reported 311 homicides also through Oct. 8, down from 346 at that point in 2022. Through the end of September, Los Angeles police reported 235 homicides, down from 311 the year before.
D.C. remains a notable outlier, though. Last month, the city surpassed 200 homicides before October for the first time since the late 1990s.
“Murder makes up a tiny fraction of overall crime, but it … makes up an oversized portion of the crime that we care about, because it has the greatest societal cost,” Asher said.
Asher said the decrease in killings nationwide in 2022 was larger than expected, adding that murders have declined even more in many cities across the country so far this year.
“The two-year decline in murder is pretty astounding at this point,” Asher said.
John Harden contributed to this report.
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