FBI Report: Homicide Rates at Pre-Pandemic Levels

Do a Google news search of “homicide,” and you will be inundated with murder stories from around the country. Scrolling through these local news reports may lead you to conclude that the country is in the grip of a crime wave. This is certainly the conclusion found across conservative media, including Fox News primetime fixture Sean Hannity, who on Oct. 6 declared that a Democrat-enabled violent crime wave is “wreaking havoc across America.” 

The data says otherwise. According to numbers released by the FBI this week, the national homicide rate dropped 6.1% in 2022, falling to pre-pandemic levels. Other violent crimes have also declined. Data journalist Katharina Bucholz dug into the FBI numbers and observed that while aggravated assaults remain at higher levels than 2019, rapes and robberies have decreased. 

Whether these numbers begin to close the circle on a narrative that began during the pandemic remains to be seen. When violent crime spiked in 2020, the rise was immediately weaponized to counter and demonize the growing movement for criminal justice reform. In one notorious instance, San Francisco’s reform DA Chesa Boudin was ousted in a recall, even though violent crime did not increase during his tenure. (Violent crime actually went up in the year after he was replaced by Brooke Jenkins, who played a pivotal role in the recall effort, but there aren’t serious calls to boot her from the job.) Ever since, conservative media and many politicians have been fearmongering about crime regardless of the evidence. In an October 2022 piece for The Wall Street Journal, former Trump Attorney General Bill Barr wrote that Democrats have “unleashed a crime wave and diminished our sense of safety on the streets.” 

Barr’s messaging has been adopted by all of the Republican candidates for president. While they have their differences, the GOP field is united in the belief that American cities have devolved into bloodbaths and Democrats and criminal reforms are to blame. Ron DeSantis has pledged to repeal The First Step Act, a package of modest prison reforms passed by Donald Trump. DeSantis also took the extreme step of issuing an executive order stripping a reform district attorney of her post. Nikki Haley has promised to make progressive DAs “prosecute according to the law,” a position based on the false premise that Democratic DAs don’t already do this. “We’ve got a crime wave in our major cities, and I think now more than ever we ought to be thinking about how we make penalties tougher on people,” former Vice President Mike Pence has claimed. Arguably making the problem much worse, blue cities mayors like Eric Adams also have blamed criminal justice reform and reform DAs for crime. 

It’s no surprise, then, that multiple polls conducted this summer found a majority of Americans fear becoming victims of violent crime. The new FBI numbers are unlikely to change that, never mind the conservative narrative that Democrats and criminal justice reform policies are fueling an historic violent crime wave.