Murders in the U.S. were down 12.7% as of Dec. 7, with a decline in 73% of the more than 175 cities with available data, according to AH Datalytics.
Washington, D.C., is one of the few U.S. cities where the murder rate has increased this year, according to the data.
"Murder plummeted in the United States in 2023, likely at one of the fastest rates of decline ever recorded," AH Datalytics co-founder Jeff Asher wrote in his Substack newsletter. "The quarterly data in particular suggests 2023 featured one of the lowest rates of violent crime in the United States in more than 50 years."
Still, the murder rate almost certainly remains higher in 2023 than in 2019.
Crime statistics in 2020 and 2021 were affected by the COVID-19 pandemic and demonstrations and riots that followed the deaths by police of George Floyd in Minneapolis and Breonna Taylor in Louisville, Kentucky.
Washington, D.C., and Memphis, Tennessee, saw an increase murders in this year, "but those cities are especially notable because they are the outliers this year, not the norm," Asher wrote.
Asher, a criminologist, added that the overall murder rate "does not mean there were not thousands upon thousands of these tragedies this year. Nor does it mean that there was an acceptable level of gun violence, even in places seeing rapid declines."
Homicides are down 13.4% in cities with a population below 100,000 with data and down 12.6% in cities with 250,000 or more.
Every category of crime, with the exception of auto theft, likely is down a considerable amount this year based on data through September from the FBI, AH Datalytics said.
However, some major cities including Chicago and Los Angeles did not report any data, Asher wrote.
The Atlantic's David A. Graham wrote that a decrease in crime seemingly would help President Joe Biden in next year's presidential election. However, the mainstream media's love of "lurid stories," as Graham explains, could offset that.
"Citizens have only the mass media to rely on for information about the national crime picture, and that information is often alarmist, sensationalistic, and decontextualized," Mark Warr, a sociologist who has studied the perception of crime, told Graham in 2021. "So crime nationally often looks much worse than it is."
Reasons for the drop in violent crimes are unclear.
"There is no single trend that explains why violence might rise or fall in different places — for instance, Philadelphia has seen a sharp drop in violence this year, but a couple hours away is Washington D.C., one of the few cities where violence has risen," Princeton sociologist Patrick Sharkey told Graham. "Trends in violence … are affected by how local communities, cities, states, and the national government respond."