Some year-end good news: U.S. homicides are down

To put deaths in their grim perspective, we have a lot more deaths from drug overdoses than from homicides.  But we're headed in the right direction on one of those. 

The NYT has the story:

After Rise in Murders During the Pandemic, a Sharp Decline in 2023. The country is on track for a record drop in homicides, and many other categories of crime are also in decline, according to the F.B.I. By Tim Arango and Campbell Robertson  Dec. 29, 2023

"In 2020, as the pandemic took hold and protests convulsed the nation after the murder of George Floyd by a police officer in Minneapolis, the United States saw the largest increase in murders ever recorded. Now, as 2023 comes to a close, the country is likely to see one of the largest — if not the largest — yearly declines in homicides, according to recent F.B.I. data and statistics collected by independent criminologists and researchers.

"The rapid decline in homicides isn’t the only story. Among nine violent and property crime categories tracked by the F.B.I., the only figure that is up over the first three quarters of this year is motor vehicle theft. The data, which covers about 80 percent of the U.S. population, is the first quarterly report in three years from the F.B.I., which typically takes many months to release crime data.