According to FBI data, the overall number of homicides and violent crimes in the US has dropped significantly

Fox and Stowell predict the murder rate will rise this summer as temperatures rise and young people are released from schools. Still, both experts predict Boston’s overall homicide rate will decline this year from a historic low of 37 murders committed in 2023.

“We’re seeing significantly fewer murders on average in Boston than in the early 1990s, when there were 152 in one year,” Fox says.

Crime in the US appears to be a significant issue in the November presidential election. A Gallup poll conducted in November found that 63% of Americans describe the U.S. crime problem as extremely or very serious, up from 54% at the last measurement in 2021.

Fox says rising murder rates tend to get more media coverage than current declines earn.

“You know the saying: no news is good news?” – says Fox. “It turns out that good news is no news at all. And bad news is big news.”

Fox says media reports of falling crime would help “calm some of the public’s fear.”

“There is huge fear,” he says.

No public mass killings in 2024

Another telling indicator is the decline in mass killings in the US. In 2024, there were 11 mass shootings that left at least four people dead, a decline of more than 50% from last year. According to the Associated Press/USA TODAY, there have been no mass killings in public places this year. Northeastern University’s Mass Homicide Database, the most comprehensive source of data on the subject. The last public mass killing occurred in October in Lewiston, Maine, where a man killed 18 people at a bowling alley and restaurant.

“The average number of public mass killings in the U.S. is about six per year, so I’m confident we’ll see an overall decline in 2024,” says Fox, who heads the mass killing database. “But there was virtually no media reporting on this topic.

“Last year, in March, there was a 2% increase (in mass killings), and I saw a lot of reports in the newspapers and on television that the number was rising,” Fox says. “But now that there has been a big decline? Silence.”

“A Uniquely American Phenomenon”

Fox says violent crime in the U.S. peaked in the early 1990s amid the crack epidemic.

“This spike was caused by a crack,” Fox says. “At that time, children were recruited to sell crack because it was believed that if they were arrested as minors, nothing bad would happen to them.”

Fox argues that the weakening crack market has accelerated a sustained, long-term decline in murder rates. Fox notes that the three-decade trend has had several outliers – most recently in 2020, when a 30% increase in U.S. homicides was driven by disruptions and unrest related to the Covid-19 pandemic.

“We’ve seen a decline since then,” Fox says. “Technically, it’s called regression to the mean. But I prefer to call it criminological seriousness: what goes up must come down.”

Fox and Stowell emphasize the need to acknowledge the improving climate while highlighting broader concerns about gun violence in the US.

“Even though homicide rates have dropped, the gun homicide rate is still higher than the overall homicide rate in other Western countries,” Fox says.

“Gun homicides are a uniquely American phenomenon,” Stowell adds.

Fox sees public fear as a casualty of America’s gun problem. She says information and perspective can help combat this fear. One of Fox’s areas of interest is the issue of school shootings.

It notes that the K-12 School Shooting Database shows a record 348 U.S. school shootings in 2023.

“But only 9% of these shootings occurred on school property,” Fox says. “Sixty percent of them occurred at night, on weekends or in the summer when schools are closed.”

A Gallup poll conducted last summer found that 38% of parents of school-age children were concerned about their children’s physical safety at school, one of the highest levels since 1977.

“The reality is that the average number of students killed by an attacker at school is seven per year,” Fox says.

For comparison, 26 students die in accidents on the way to school every year, he says.

“Every school shooting is a tragedy, and one school shooting is one too many,” Fox says. “But parents are afraid that their child will be sitting in class, a gunman will appear and start shooting, and then they will see 348 shootings at school in a year and that is what scares them the most.

“When in fact most of these shootings didn’t happen at school,” Fox says. “A gunshot on school property is different than a school shooting.”

Ian Thomsen is a reporter for Northeastern Global News. Email him at [email protected]. Follow him on X/Twitter @IanatNU.