Lincoln, Nebraska recorded a 100% drop in homicides in the first half of 2026. Rochester, New York cut theirs by 76%. Across 30 major American cities, roughly 215 fewer people are projected to be murdered this year than last.
San Francisco saw a 55% increase.
The Council on Criminal Justice, an independent nonprofit, released its midyear crime report on Thursday tracking 13 categories of crime across 30 American cities. The headline number is staggering: an 18% decrease in the homicide rate compared to the first half of 2025. If the trend holds through December, 2026 will post the lowest homicide rate in over a century. As in, you'd have to rewind past the Great Depression, past Prohibition, past two World Wars to find a year this safe.
Nine of the thirteen crime categories tracked showed decreases. Carjackings dropped. Residential burglaries dropped. Aggravated assaults dropped. Two-thirds of the cities sampled showed improvement in their homicide numbers.
The cities still heading the wrong direction tell their own story. Norfolk, Virginia posted a 64% increase. San Francisco came in at 55%. Chicago, Illinois and Denver, Colorado also saw notable upticks in their homicide rates. Eight cities total bucked the national trend. Nobody needs a decoder ring to figure out the common denominator in municipal governance across those outliers.
Remember 2020? When homicides spiked across every major metro in the country while cities defunded police departments, emptied jails, and turned prosecutors into public defenders? We were told that was a complex sociological phenomenon with no easy answers. Certainly nothing to do with policy. Just vibes and a pandemic and systemic whatever.
Now violent crime is plummeting under Republican leaders who told every city in America that law enforcement would be backed, borders would be secured, and prosecutors who refused to prosecute would lose federal funding. No more of Democrats soft on crime policies.
The "criminal justice reform" crowd will point out that crime was already declining before January 2025. And the numbers had dipped ever so slightly since the peak in 2020. But those same experts can't seem to explain why all of a sudden we've seen a 18% year-over-year freefall. The gently slide down is over and we're watching a cratering all of a sudden. It's an acceleration — and it started accelerating when the policy environment shifted from apology to enforcement.
The cities still losing ground make the case better than any White House press release could. Same country. Same economy. Same weather. Different local leadership, different results. Norfolk and San Francisco aren't failing because of national trends. They're failing despite them.