downtrend

Should that downtrend hold through the rest of the year, he added, it will amount to the "largest decline in violence that America has seen since we started tracking it."

Because violent crime appears to be on a downtrend toward pre-pandemic levels, which saw a 2018 and 2019 murder rate of 5.2 per 100,000 people, according to the FBI Uniform Crime Reporting Program's 2022 estimations, Piquero argued local, state and federal efforts to prevent and reduce crime are more important now than before.

"This builds on news that we have about crime in 2023. If you look back further, you can see that this is a continuation of a downtrend that began a couple of years ago," said Ames Grawert, senior counsel for the Justice program at NYU Law's Brennan Center for Justice.

"So it's not just that we're looking at a single year of decline so far in 2024, but it's that this is basically showing a continuation of a downtrend in violent crime nationally to the point that we might be in the process of reversing, or close to fully reversing, some of the increases we saw during the COVID-19 pandemic."

But it's worth noting that the third quarter gain came amid a slump in domestic prices, which were in a downtrend from May to early October.