CRIME

 Daily Beast - Despite several high-profile violent crimes last year, the murder rate plummeted for the third year in a row in 2024, bringing homicides down to pre-pandemic levels for the first time in four years, ABC News reported. Homicides jumped 30 percent, the largest single-year increase in a more than 100 years. A dozen major cities broke annual homicide records in 2021, until things began to turn around in 2022. That year, murders fell by a modest 6 percent, followed by 13 percent in 2023—the largest decrease on record. Now, preliminary data suggest the homicide rate fell by 16 percent overall in 2024, amounting to 5,000 fewer deaths compared to 2020, 2021 and 2022. Last year, murders were down by 40 percent in Philadelphia, 29 percent in Washington, D.C., and 24 percent in Baltimore. New York, Chicago and Los Angeles also made gains, while cities with fewer than 250,000 people experienced a 19 percent drop on average. Experts credited a number of federal and local interventions, such the 2022 Bipartisan Safter Communities Act, which allocated $750 million to help states implement violence-reduction laws. Despite the positive trends, several violent crimes dominated the news last year. Those included two assassination attempts against president-elect Donald Trump, the assassination of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson, and a record number of school shootings.