Across the United States, major cities are reporting a significant dip in the number of violent crimes committed in 2024 compared to 2023. Homicides fell to pre-pandemic levels across 22 of the 29 sample cities noted by the Council on Criminal Justice (CCJ) last year, showing a 16% drop in murders compared to the previous year.
Dallas was not included in the survey, but data from the Dallas Police Department shows a similar trend.
Dallas recorded a 26.21% decrease in homicides in 2024, Major Nathan Swyers of the violent crime division told the City Council’s Public Safety Committee earlier this month. That decrease represents 65 fewer murder victims than in 2023.
“I was very excited to see the year-end numbers,” Council Member Cara Mendelsohn said. “You start saying there was a 26.21% reduction in murders, but then you say that’s 65 less people that died this year. That’s incredible.”
Dallas launched the police department’s violent crime reduction plan in May 2021 in response to crime rates that started spiking in 2018; that increasing crime trend was mirrored by many U.S. cities during the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. Locally, Dallas’ 2024 crime data is a testament to the reduction plan. Nationwide the dip in violent crime signals a “promising” trend, the CCJ report says.
“Our victim count continues to trend down as it has since we started this crime plan,” Swyers told the committee, presenting a graph that shows a year-over-year decrease in victims across most violent crimes.
Mendelsohn called it “remarkable” that violent crime data has improved even beyond 2019-level numbers.
Dallas recorded 200 murders in 2019 and 183 murders in 2024 for an 8.5% decrease in homicides. Of the cities surveyed by the CCJ, homicides nationally were 6% lower in 2024 than in 2019. Cities with a reputation for high crime rates such as Baltimore, Detroit and St. Louis have improved to 2014 levels — a year that marked historic lows for homicide rates nationally.
“If that decrease holds once a larger number of jurisdictions report 2024 data to the FBI later this year, it would rank among the biggest single-year homicide drops since at least 1960, the start of modern record keeping,” the CCJ report states.
Data for most other violent crimes is also promising, both in Dallas and nationally.
Dallas police data shows that business robberies were the only type of violent crime to see a significant increase in 2024, ending the year almost 4% higher than 2023 numbers. That works out to 18 additional victims in 2024, but Swyers called the year-end data “a little bit of a win,” because the department was able to slow down a major spike in business robberies seen at the beginning of the year. In May 2024, business robberies were up 36% from the year prior.
In year-over-year findings, aggravated assault decreased 4% in the cities surveyed by the CCJ.
Police also recorded a 0.42% increase in family violence-related aggravated assaults, though non-family violence aggravated assaults fell 10.54% in 2024. That decrease comes out to 500 fewer victims of non-family violence assault across Dallas last year.
