In 2023, the violent crime rate in the United States was 363.8 cases per 100,000 of the population. Even though the violent crime rate has been decreasing since 1990, the United States tops the ranking of countries with the most prisoners. In addition, due to the FBI's transition to a new crime reporting system in which law enforcement agencies voluntarily submit crime reports, data may not accurately reflect the total number of crimes committed in recent years. Reported violent crime rate in the United States The United States Federal Bureau of Investigation tracks the rate of reported violent crimes per 100,000 U.S. inhabitants. In the timeline above, rates are shown starting in 1990. The rate of reported violent crime has fallen since a high of 758.20 reported crimes in 1991 to a low of 363.6 reported violent crimes in 2014. In 2023, there were around 1.22 million violent crimes reported to the FBI in the United States. This number can be compared to the total number of property crimes, roughly 6.41 million that year. Of violent crimes in 2023, aggravated assaults were the most common offenses in the United States, while homicide offenses were the least common. Law enforcement officers and crime clearance Though the violent crime rate was down in 2013, the number of law enforcement officers also fell. Between 2005 and 2009, the number of law enforcement officers in the United States rose from around 673,100 to 708,800. However, since 2009, the number of officers fell to a low of 626,900 officers in 2013. The number of law enforcement officers has since grown, reaching 720,652 in 2023. In 2023, the crime clearance rate in the U.S. was highest for murder and non-negligent manslaughter charges, with around 57.8 percent of murders being solved by investigators and a suspect being charged with the crime. Additionally, roughly 46.1 percent of aggravated assaults were cleared in that year. A statistics report on violent crime in the U.S. can be found here.

In the 21st century, homicide has been responsible for roughly 0.6 to 0.8 percent of all deaths in the United States. While this is higher than annual rates observed in the post-WWII era, it is significantly less than the rates seen between the mid-1960s and mid-1990s, where over one percent of all deaths in the U.S. were from homicide in most years. Crime wave of the late 20th century There are a variety of factors attributed to the crime wave of the late 20th century. Demographic factors include the arrival of the baby boomer generation into adolescence, a rise in urbanization, and a growing share of the population living in poverty. A series of economic recessions saw the prosperity of the post-war period come to an end, and many turned to crime in response.

This coincided with a rise in the illegal drug trade and drug consumption, as well as the federal government's response via the so-called "War on Drugs", which changed the dynamics of inter-city crime and law enforcement for decades to come. A rise in incarceration rates has been cited as one of the reasons for the "Great Crime Decline" of the 1990s, although many are skeptical of its long-term effectiveness.

In 2023, an estimated 1,21,467 violent crimes occurred in the United States. This is a decrease from the year before, when 1,256,671 violent crimes were reported. Violent crime in the United States The Federal Bureau of Investigation reported that violent crime fell nationwide in the period from 1990 to 2023. Violent crime was at a height of 1.93 million crimes in 1992, but has since reached a low of 1.15 million violent crimes in 2014. When conducting crime reporting, the FBI’s Uniform Crime Reporting Program considered murder, nonnegligent manslaughter, forcible rape, robbery and aggravated assault to be violent crimes, because they are offenses which involve force or threat of violence. In 2023, there were 19,252 reported murder and nonnegligent manslaughter cases in the United States. California ranked first on a list of U.S. states by number of murders, followed by Texas, and Florida.The greatest number of murders were committed by murderers of unknown relationship to their victim. “Girlfriend” was the fourth most common relationship of victim to offender in 2023, with a reported 568 partners murdering their girlfriends that year, while the sixth most common was “wife.” In addition, seven people were murdered by their employees and 12 people were murdered by their employers. The most used murder weapon in 2023 was the handgun, which was used in 7,1 murders that year. According to the FBI, firearms (of all types) were used in more than half of the nation’s murders. The total number of firearms manufactured in the U.S. annually has reached over 13 million units.

The graph illustrates the murder rate in the United States from 1985 to 2025. The x-axis represents the years, labeled with two-digit abbreviations from '85 to '25, while the y-axis shows the annual murder rate per 100,000 individuals. Throughout this 41-year period, the murder rate fluctuates between a high of 10.66 in 1991 and a low of 4.7 in 2014. Overall, the data reveals a significant downward trend in the murder rate from the mid-1980s, reaching its lowest point in the mid-2010s, followed by slight increases in the most recent years.

In response to a growing concern about hate crimes, the United States Congress enacted the Hate Crime Statistics Act of 1990. The Act requires the attorney general to establish guidelines and collect, as part of the Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR) Program, data "about crimes that manifest evidence of prejudice based on race, religion, sexual orientation, or ethnicity, including where appropriate the crimes of murder and non-negligent manslaughter, forcible rape, aggravated assault, simple assault, intimidation, arson, and destruction, damage or vandalism of property." Hate crime data collection was required by the Act to begin in calendar year 1990 and to continue for four successive years. In September 1994, the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act amended the Hate Crime Statistics Act to add disabilities, both physical and mental, as factors that could be considered a basis for hate crimes. Although the Act originally mandated data collection for five years, the Church Arson Prevention Act of 1996 amended the collection duration "for each calendar year," making hate crime statistics a permanent addition to the UCR program. As with the other UCR data, law enforcement agencies contribute reports either directly or through their state reporting programs. Information contained in the data includes number of victims and offenders involved in each hate crime incident, type of victims, bias motivation, offense type, and location type.

As of September 2024, California had the most mass shootings in the United States, with 26 total shootings since 1982. The source defines a mass shooting as a shooting where three or more people were killed. Recently, a mass shooting occurred in the state of Maine on October 26, 2023, during which one of the highest number of fatalities from a mass shooting was recorded after Robert Card opened fire in a bowling alley and a bar, killing 18 and injuring 13 others. Firearms in the U.S. Mass shootings in the United States are disturbingly common. In comparison with other Western countries, there are significantly more shootings in the U.S., which some theorize is due to the relatively lax gun control laws. Gun control laws in the U.S. are dependent on the state, and the right to own a firearm is enshrined in the United States Constitution. Mass shootings The worst mass shooting in the U.S. was the Las Vegas Strip massacre in 2017, which resulted in 58 deaths and 546 injuries. 13 of the worst mass shootings in the United States have occurred since 2015 and the vast majority of these incidents in the U.S. have been carried out by shooters who are White and male.

There has been little research on United States homicide rates from a long-term perspective, primarily because there has been no consistent data series on a particular place preceding the Uniform Crime Reports (UCR), which began its first full year in 1931. To fill this research gap, this project created a data series on homicides per capita for New York City that spans two centuries. The goal was to create a site-specific, individual-based data series that could be used to examine major social shifts related to homicide, such as mass immigration, urban growth, war, demographic changes, and changes in laws. Data were also gathered on various other sites, particularly in England, to allow for comparisons on important issues, such as the post-World War II wave of violence. The basic approach to the data collection was to obtain the best possible estimate of annual counts and the most complete information on individual homicides. The annual count data (Parts 1 and 3) were derived from multiple sources, including the Federal Bureau of Investigation's Uniform Crime Reports and Supplementary Homicide Reports, as well as other official counts from the New York City Police Department and the City Inspector in the early 19th century. The data include a combined count of murder and manslaughter because charge bargaining often blurs this legal distinction. The individual-level data (Part 2) were drawn from coroners' indictments held by the New York City Municipal Archives, and from daily newspapers. Duplication was avoided by keeping a record for each victim. The estimation technique known as "capture-recapture" was used to estimate homicides not listed in either source. Part 1 variables include counts of New York City homicides, arrests, and convictions, as well as the homicide rate, race or ethnicity and gender of victims, type of weapon used, and source of data. Part 2 includes the date of the murder, the age, sex, and race of the offender and victim, and whether the case led to an arrest, trial, conviction, execution, or pardon. Part 3 contains annual homicide counts and rates for various comparison sites including Liverpool, London, Kent, Canada, Baltimore, Los Angeles, Seattle, and San Francisco.

These data are part of NACJD's Fast Track Release and are distributed as they were received from the data depositor. The files have been zipped by NACJD for release, but not checked or processed except for the removal of direct identifiers. Users should refer to the accompanying readme file for a brief description of the files available with this collection and consult the investigator(s) if further information is needed. The purpose of this research was to examine the influence of neighborhood social disorganization on the risk of homicide victimization, with focus on how community effects changed once individual-level characteristics were considered. This research integrated concepts from social disorganization theory, a neighborhood theory of criminal behavior, with concepts from lifestyle theory and individual theory of criminal behavior, by having examined the effects of both neighborhood-level predictors of disadvantage and individual attributes which may compel that person to behave in certain ways. The data for this secondary analysis project are from the 2004-2012 National Center for Health Statistics' (NCHS) National Health Interview Survey (NHIS) linked National Death Index-Multiple Causes of Death (MDC) data, which provided individual-level data on homicide mortality. Neighborhood-level (block group) characteristics of disadvantage that existed within each respondent's place of residence from the 2005-2009 and 2008-2012 American Community Surveys were integrated using restricted geographic identifiers from the NHIS. As a syntax-only study, data included as part of this collection includes 38 SAS Program (syntax) files that were used by the researcher in analyses of external restricted-use data. The data are not included because they are restricted archival data from the NHIS from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention combined with publicly available American Community Survey (ACS) block group level data.

Between 1982 and September 2024, 82 out of the 151 mass shootings in the United States were carried out by White shooters. By comparison, the perpetrator was African American in 26 mass shootings, and Latino in 12. When calculated as percentages, this amounts to 54 percent, 17 percent, and eight percent respectively. Race of mass shooters reflects the U.S. population Broadly speaking, the racial distribution of mass shootings mirrors the racial distribution of the U.S. population as a whole. While a superficial comparison of the statistics seems to suggest African American shooters are over-represented and Latino shooters underrepresented, the fact that the shooter’s race is unclear in around nine percent of cases, along with the different time frames over which these statistics are calculated, means no such conclusions should be drawn. Conversely, looking at the mass shootings in the United States by gender clearly demonstrates that the majority of mass shootings are carried out by men. Mass shootings and mental health With no clear patterns between the socio-economic or cultural background of mass shooters, increasing attention has been placed on mental health. Analysis of the factors Americans considered to be to blame for mass shootings showed 80 percent of people felt the inability of the mental health system to recognize those who pose a danger to others was a significant factor. This concern is not without merit – in over half of the mass shootings since 1982, the shooter showed prior signs of mental health issues, suggesting improved mental health services may help deal with this horrific problem. Mass shootings and guns In the wake of multiple mass shootings, critics have sought to look beyond the issues of shooter identification and their influences by focusing on their access to guns. The majority of mass shootings in the U.S. involve firearms which were obtained legally, reflecting the easy ability of Americans to purchase and carry deadly weapons in public. Gun control takes on a particular significance when the uniquely American phenomenon of school shootings is considered. The annual number of incidents involving firearms at K-12 schools in the U.S. was over 100 in each year since 2018. Conversely, similar incidents in other developed countries exceptionally rare, with only five school shootings in G7 countries other than the U.S. between 2009 and 2018.

This dataset contains county-level totals for the years 2002-2014 for eight types of crime: murder, rape, robbery, aggravated assault, burglary, larceny, motor vehicle theft, and arson. These crimes are classed as Part I criminal offenses by the United States Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI) in their Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR) program. Each record in the dataset represents the total of each type of criminal offense reported in (or, in the case of missing data, attributed to) the county in a given year.

The primary objective of this project was to explore the familial, physical, psychological, social, and cultural antecedents and correlates of violent criminal offending. This research used an extensive longitudinal database collected on 1,345 young adult male offenders admitted to the Federal Correctional Institution (FCI) in Tallahassee, Florida, from November 3, 1970, to November 2, 1972. Using FBI arrest records ("rap sheets"), each inmate was classified on the basis of the National Crime Information Center Uniform Offense Codes into one of four distinct categories: (1) "angry violent," in which the apparent goal was to injure the victim, (2) "instrumentally violent," in which the aggressive behavior was a means to an end (as in a robbery), (3) "potentially violent," as evidenced by making threats or carrying weapons but in which the offender was not accused of any violent offenses, and (4) "nonviolent," in which the offender had not been charged with violent criminal behavior. Violent offenders were also subdivided into those who had been repetitively violent and those who had been charged with just one violent offense. As part of the classification process, each inmate was administered an extensive battery of tests by the research project staff. The two primary personality assessment instruments utilized were the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory (MMPI) and the California Psychological Inventory (CPI). Each inmate's caseworker filled out a series of of standard Bureau of Prisons forms recording the results of the medical, educational, and psychological evaluations, as well as salient aspects of the case and criminal history. The researchers also obtained copies of each offender's Presentence Investigation Report (PSI) that had been prepared by the federal probation officer, and then devised a series of scales to quantify the PSI data. In addition, an hour-long structured intake interview was administered to each inmate by his team psychologist. Global scales were constructed from these intake interviews. After each interview, the psychologists performed an evaluative Q-sort. Nine scales were later constructed based on these Q-sorts. Also, every dormitory officer and every work supervisor completed scales assessing each subject's interpersonal adjustment and work performance at 90-day intervals. Immediately prior to release, as many inmates as possible were reinterviewed and retested on the MMPI and the CPI. Follow-ups using FBI rap sheets were conducted in 1976 and 1984. Variables obtained from the Bureau of Prisons forms include age upon entry, race, marital status, age at first arrest, number of prior adult convictions, commitment offense(s), highest school grade completed, drug dependency, and alcoholism. Scales developed from the PSIs provide data on father, mother, and siblings, family incohesiveness, adequacy of childhood dwelling, social deviance of family, school problems, employment problems, achievement motivation, problems with interpersonal relations, authority conflicts, childhood and adolescent or adult maladjustment and deviance, poor physical health, juvenile conviction record, adult arrest and conviction record, violence of offense, group influence on illegal behavior, and prior prison adjustment. The intake interview inquired about the developmental family history and the child's development, the inmate's marriage, educational, and work history and attitudes, attitudes toward sex, military service and attitudes, self-reported use of alcohol and other substances, religious preferences and practices, and problems during any previous confinements. Scales based on the psychologists' Q-sorts evaluated aggression, hostility avoidance, authority conflict, sociability, social withdrawal, social/emotional constriction, passivity, dominance, and adaptation to the environment. Data are also provided on global dorm adjustment and the number of shots, cell house days, sick calls, and infractions for the offenders' first and second 90-day periods at the FCI.

This table contains data on the rate of violent crime (crimes per 1,000 population) for California, its regions, counties, cities and towns. Crime and population data are from the Federal Bureau of Investigations, Uniform Crime Reports. Rates above the city/town level include data from city, university and college, county, state, tribal, and federal law enforcement agencies. The table is part of a series of indicators in the Healthy Communities Data and Indicators Project of the Office of Health Equity. Ten percent of all deaths in young California adults aged 15-44 years are related to assault and homicide. In 2010, California law enforcement agencies reported 1,809 murders, 8,331 rapes, and over 95,000 aggravated assaults. African Americans in California are 11 times more likely to die of assault and homicide than Whites. More information about the data table and a data dictionary can be found in the About/Attachments section.

Intentional homicides (per 100,000 people) in United States was reported at 6.8075 in 2021, according to the World Bank collection of development indicators, compiled from officially recognized sources. United States - Intentional homicides (per 100;000 people) - actual values, historical data, forecasts and projections were sourced from the World Bank on September of 2025.

Historical dataset showing North America murder/homicide rate per 100K population by year from 2010 to 2021.

Historical dataset showing U.S. murder/homicide rate per 100K population by year from 1990 to 2021.

Existing literature on cross-national variation in violence has paid little attention to the transnational transmission of crime. One such channel is the forced return of migrants with a penal record in their country of temporary residence. Responding to this research gap, we study the effect of US deportations of convicts on levels of violent crime in deportees’ country of origin for a cross-country panel of up to 123 countries covering the years 2003 to 2014. We find a strong and robust effect of the deportation of convicts on homicide rates in countries of origin, which is to a large degree driven by deportations to Latin America and the Caribbean. An additional inflow of ten deportees with a prior criminal history per 100,000 increases expected homicide rates by roughly two. In addition to controlling for country-specific fixed effects, we provide evidence on a causal effect using an instrumental variable approach, which exploits spatial and time variation in migrant populations’ exposure to state-level immigration policies in the United States.

In 2019, there were six deaths by homicide per 100,000 of the population in the United States, compared to 5.9 deaths by homicide in the previous year. This is an increase from 1950, when there were 5.1 deaths by homicide per 100,000 resident population in the United States. However, within the provided time period, the death rate for homicide in the U.S. was highest in 1980, when there were 10.4 deaths by homicide per 100,000 of the population in the United States.

Homicides in the United States

The term homicide is used when a human being is killed by another human being. Criminal homicide takes several forms, for example murder; but homicide is not always a crime, it also includes affirmative defense, insanity, self-defense or the execution of convicted criminals. In the United States, youth homicide has especially been seen as a problem of urban areas, due to poverty, limited adult supervision, involvement in drug and gang activities, and school failure. Both homicide rates and suicide rates in the U.S. among people aged 20 to 24 and teenagers aged 15 to 19 have vastly increased since 2001.

In 2023, the District of Columbia had the highest reported violent crime rate in the United States, with 1,150.9 violent crimes per 100,000 of the population. Maine had the lowest reported violent crime rate, with 102.5 offenses per 100,000 of the population. Life in the District The District of Columbia has seen a fluctuating population over the past few decades. Its population decreased throughout the 1990s, when its crime rate was at its peak, but has been steadily recovering since then. While unemployment in the District has also been falling, it still has had a high poverty rate in recent years. The gentrification of certain areas within Washington, D.C. over the past few years has made the contrast between rich and poor even greater and is also pushing crime out into the Maryland and Virginia suburbs around the District. Law enforcement in the U.S. Crime in the U.S. is trending downwards compared to years past, despite Americans feeling that crime is a problem in their country. In addition, the number of full-time law enforcement officers in the U.S. has increased recently, who, in keeping with the lower rate of crime, have also made fewer arrests than in years past.

In response to a growing concern about hate crimes, the United States Congress enacted the Hate Crime Statistics Act of 1990. The Act requires the attorney general to establish guidelines and collect, as part of the Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR) Program, data "about crimes that manifest evidence of prejudice based on race, religion, sexual orientation, or ethnicity, including where appropriate the crimes of murder and non-negligent manslaughter, forcible rape, aggravated assault, simple assault, intimidation, arson, and destruction, damage or vandalism of property." Hate crime data collection was required by the Act to begin in calendar year 1990 and to continue for four successive years. In September 1994, the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act amended the Hate Crime Statistics Act to add disabilities, both physical and mental, as factors that could be considered a basis for hate crimes. Although the Act originally mandated data collection for five years, the Church Arson Prevention Act of 1996 amended the collection duration "for each calendar year," making hate crime statistics a permanent addition to the UCR program. As with the other UCR data, law enforcement agencies contribute reports either directly or through their state reporting programs. Information contained in the data includes number of victims and offenders involved in each hate crime incident, type of victims, bias motivation, offense type, and location type.

These data provide incident-level information on criminal homicides including date, location, circumstances, and method of offense, as well as demographic characteristics of victims and perpetrators and the relationship between the two. For this dataset, the original Uniform Crime Reports data were completely restructured into a nested, or hierarchical, form with repeating records. Specifically, the file contains one record for each agency per year (record type "A"), nested within which is one record per incident (record type "I"). Victim records (record type "V") are in turn nested within incident records, and offender data are repeated for all offenders on each victim record. Part 3, ORI List, contains Originating Agency Identifier (ORI) codes used by the FBI and the corresponding agency name.