Urban gun violence is down, way down:
Gun violence is trending downward for more than three quarters of cities with the most shootings, according to a new analysis by The Trace’s Gun Violence Data Hub. For more than half of those cities, the rate of decrease is even greater than it was last year — when the drop in gun homicides broke all previous records.
The downward trend includes red and blue cities, in both red and blue states, in all of the country’s regions. It includes cities where shootings are traditionally sky-high, like Baltimore, and much safer cities, like Austin, Texas.
…The results reveal variations on a theme across hundreds of cities: A steep spike beginning in 2020 or slightly after, coinciding with the peak of the COVID-19 pandemic and Black Lives Matter protests. Then, a similarly high number of shootings in 2022, followed by steep decreases from 2023 on. Cities like Detroit and Philadelphia are now seeing the lowest rates of gun violence in decades [Olga Pierce, “A Trace Analysis of 150 U.S. Cities Shows One of the Greatest Drops in Gun Violence—Ever,” The Trace, 2025.10.23].
University of Chicago social research professor John Roman says this encouraging reversal has a lot to do with keeping diligent public servants on the job:
At first, many experts declared it too early to disentangle the effects of the pandemic winding down, the justice system coming back to life, the cresting of Black Lives Matter unrest, economic variables, and a host of other possible factors. Now, after two more years of sharp declines, Roman said, it seems that the answer is people: Teachers, counselors, after-school program staff, basketball coaches, violence interrupters, and others who are on the front lines of fighting gun violence.
“We lost over 1.25 million local government jobs between March and May of 2020,” he said. “These are the people who directly interact with young people at the greatest risk of gun violence and victimization and suddenly there were a lot fewer of them. It took a long time for those jobs to return. It wasn’t until 2023 that we saw that number return to anything like normal” [Pierce, 2025.10.23].
The federal government played a key role in keeping those people on the job by surging money (not soldiers) to cities nationwide:
The American Rescue Plan Act, passed in 2021 included $130.2 billion to help counties and cities. The stated intent was to help local governments remain solvent during the pandemic, but for many communities it was the first direct federal funding ever received.
The next year, the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act designated $250 million over five years for community-based violence prevention initiatives, and $750 million for state programs including red flag laws and mental health courts.
Now, much of that funding has dried up, and community-based groups across the nation are being told their funding won’t be renewed.
“The big policy question is: What are we going to do to replace it?” Roman said. “Did we learn from the last three years?” [Pierce, 2025.10.23].
In an about-face from that sensible and effective policy, the current bloodthirsty regime cutting urban aid and confabulating a narrative that violence is spiraling out of control. Perversely, brutally, that false narrative can heighten crime and violence:
…using language like “hellhole” to describe a place can cause active harm, said Ray Rice, a board member of the Ethical Society of Police, who grew up in the St. Louis area and then was a police officer in St. Louis County during years when the city was often called the “murder capital of America.”
“Language like ‘hellhole’ can be a deterrent to investment,” Rice said, because employers don’t want to set up shop where potential employees are scared to live. “Most of us, our biggest investment is our house. You force people to make a decision that if the president is saying the city I live in is a hellhole, I need to leave this city.”
In this way, he said, the stigma worsens situations, like poverty and tight municipal finances, that contributed to violence in the first place [Pierce, 2025.10.23].
The way to decrease gun violence in cities is to send help, not hellfire.