The number of homicides in 36 US cities that report timely data fell 18 percent in the first half of 2026 compared with the same period a year earlier, according to the Council on Criminal Justice's mid-year report, which projects the country is on track for what it calls a likely new historic low [1]. Homicide in those cities now sits 51 percent below its 2022 peak [1].
Carjacking, the offense that drove much of the pandemic-era anxiety about street crime, fell 47 percent over the same window [1]. The report frames the overall picture as most crime rates continuing to decline at mid-year, a continuation of a fall that began after 2022 rather than a single good quarter [1].
The decline is broad. It is not uniform, and the report says so in the same breath. Domestic violence rose 8 percent, drug offenses rose 12 percent, and shoplifting rose 5 percent and remains above its 2019 level even as most other categories fall [1]. Those are not rounding errors around a happy headline; they are the offenses where the trend runs the other way, named by the same researchers who reported the record low.
Geography splits the story too. The report identifies cities including Norfolk, Pittsburgh, and Minneapolis where crime is running above where it stood in 2019, before the pandemic-era surge [1]. A national average of steep decline can sit on top of local realities that feel nothing like a record year.
Adam Gelb, the Council on Criminal Justice's chief executive, tied the breadth of the decline to its indifference to who runs city hall. 'Murder and other crime rates are falling across the map, in cities with different political leadership,' he said [1]. The point cuts against a common framing that credits or blames a single mayor or party for a trend visible in cities governed very differently.
What the report does not do is explain the cause, and it does not claim to. A drop of this size invites tidy stories about policing, prosecution, or the fading of a pandemic shock, and the mid-year data supports none of them on its own. What it supports is narrower and more durable: homicide is falling fast and broadly, domestic violence is rising, and the cities that were struggling before 2020 are, in several cases, still struggling now.
