We made a list of 30 US cities with highest homicide rates in 2024, keeping a variety of information in mind. The national murder rate has gone down since the early 1990s, when it was 9.9 per 100,000 people. It is now 7.8 per 100,000 people, but the real question is what city has the most homicides this year? Mississippi has the biggest rise in murders, from 9 per 100,000 people in 2005 to 23.7 per 100,000 people in 2021. The next states with the biggest jumps were Louisiana, New Mexico, Alabama, and Illinois. Take a look at US cities with highest homicide rates in 2024 list to see which of their cities are on it.
If we look at the US cities with highest homicide rates in 2024 map, we’ll see those five states—New Jersey, California, Massachusetts, Arizona, and Idaho—saw small drops, with fewer than one murder per 100,000 people. The US murder rate rose from 6.0 in 2019 to 7.8 in 2020, which was the biggest single year rise in modern history. The previous highest annual rise was 20% from 2000 to 2001, from 5.9% to 6.9%. The CDC says this was because of the September 11 terrorist strikes. When compiling the list of US cities with highest homicide rates in 2024, we considered the opinion of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). According to them, the age-adjusted national homicide death rate rose 30% in 2020, which was a new high. It then rose another 5% in 2021. With 8.2 deaths per 100,000 people, the murder rate in 2021 was 55% higher than it had been ten years before. Even so, the murder rate in the US is still lower than it was at its highest point in the 1970s and early 1990s.
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As the country moves farther away from the peak of the pandemic, as our list of the US cities with highest homicide rates in 2024 shows, crime rates are mostly back to what they were before COVID. The same trend we saw when creating the list of the 35 most dangerous cities in the world. When we calculated the most murders by city USA, we saw that there have been drops in homicides in the study cities and many other places, which is a good sign. However, the progress is not uniform, and US cities have among the highest homicide rates in the world. Also, there are other ways to get information about crime, such as household surveys of violent victims. Reports to law enforcement agencies should show higher rates and more noticeable changes. There were about 20,000 deaths from intentional violence last year, which is still too many. This is true even in places where the murder rate has gone back to what it was before 2020. Other trends, like carjacking and theft of motor vehicles, also need a lot of attention.
Motor vehicle theft is an example of a “keystone” crime because stolen cars are often used to commit robberies, drive-by shootings, and other violent crimes. Because of these reasons and to get long-term drops in crime, towns, businesses, and the federal, state, and local governments must all put money into crime prevention programs that are based on facts. In the 32 study cities that provided homicide statistics, there were 515 fewer murders in 2023 than in 2022. This is a 10% drop.
The CDC and FBI are the two main places where the federal government gets information on murders. The two agencies use slightly different definitions of homicide and different ways to gather and look at their statistics. In the past, their yearly numbers and trends have been similar.
The FBI includes homicide in its crime records, which lets you compare crime rates and helped in creating the list of the US cities with highest homicide rates in 2024. The CDC includes homicide as a cause of death, which lets you compare death rates.
USAFacts uses CDC data because it is more detailed and stays the same over time. The CDC gets information about murders from standard death certificates, which have medical information that is usually filled out by coroners or medical investigators.
The FBI, on the other hand, depends on local police forces reporting crime information on their own, which many do not do. The FBI also changed the way it collects data in 2021, so you can’t directly compare murder data from 2021 to data from before 2020. Due to low response rates, many police departments have not sent in crime data under the new system. This makes the FBI’s predictions for 2021 inaccurate.
We made a list of the 30 US cities with highest homicide rates in 2024 by comparing old and new lists of the places with the highest murder rates and crime rates. One of them is the old list, El Consejo Ciudadano para la Seguridad Pública y la Justicia Penal, a group from Mexico City that works to improve public safety and criminal justice. The second list, based on CT YE 2023 Annual Graphs_CCJ and annual rates for 2023, was more accurate than the first one, though, so we compared the results with it, too. Lastly, we used statistics from AHD Data Analytics to find the exact difference between the number of murders this year and last year. The number of killings in 2024, though, only shows the number of murders for three or four months. This is not the complete picture we need. To avoid confusion, we used facts and lists from the past. Since the murder rate for a year isn’t always accurate because people, gangs, and terrorists can change how they act, we compared it to lists from previous year. However, some places have been at the top of lists for years and they are still there this year. The top five cities with the highest murder rates in the US over the past ten years show up on more than one list. This is what our list of US cities with highest homicide rates looks like.
30. Arlington
Between 2018 and 2022, just 3.8 out of every 100,000 Arlington County people died because of homicide or a land transport incident, according to Centers for Disease Control and Prevention data. It is also among the highest gun violence by city USA. This is a lower death rate than any other county in the country with a population of at least 100,000. Arlington stands noteworthy for its minimal traffic deaths, so we put it at the bottom of the list of the US cities with highest homicide rates in 2024. Between 2018 and 2022, the county had the lowest proportion of vehicular deaths, with 2.7 per 100,000. The second-lowest county was Manhattan, with 3.2 deaths.
