The American City With the Most Murders Last Year

By Douglas A. McIntyre Published Apr 15, 7:15AM EDT

The American City With the Most Murders Last Year — © carlballou / Getty Images

The FBI’s Uniform Crime Report released last month showed that, overall, violent crime in 2023 fell from 2022. And murders dropped 13%. Another recent report supports this trend but shows one of America’s largest cities had a triple-digit number of murders in the first quarter of this year.

A new report from crime-data analyst Jeff Asher, published in The Wall Street Journal, compares murders in major cities in the first quarter of 2024 to the same period of last year. (In some cities, the figures were available for the first week in April.) The only city with a triple-digit murder count for the period was Chicago, at 118. Unlike many other large cities, its 9% decline was very modest.

“There’s just a ton of places that you can point to that are showing widespread, very positive trends,” Asher commented. Boston saw the largest percentage drop among the cities analyzed, with a fall off of 82% to two murders. The total murder numbers in some cities analyzed were probably too low to offer valuable data about percentages. (See the most famous crime that shook each state.)

Other cities with a large number of murders that had a significant percentage drop over the period were Detroit (down 32% to 43), Philadelphia (down 34% to 75), and New York (down 15% to 88).

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About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.