Riding Out 2026 With Hope: Violence Is Falling, and the Work Isn't Done

There's a kind of news that doesn't make headlines because nothing exploded. Nobody was shot. A family didn't get the call. That quiet news has been piling up for three years now, and in 2026 it's loud enough to say out loud: violence in America is falling, fast, and it's falling the most in the communities that have suffered the most.

I want to walk through what the numbers actually show, without hype and without spin. Then I want to be honest about what hasn't changed, because hope that ignores the hard parts isn't hope. It's just wishful thinking.

Where we started

Let's remember how bad it got. In 2020, homicide jumped about 30% nationally, the largest one-year rise on record. Researchers point to several pressures hitting at once. The pandemic disrupted schools, jobs, and services. Gun purchases hit records. Trust between police and communities was strained after the killing of George Floyd.

Black Americans carried the heaviest share of that pain. According to CDC data, the firearm homicide rate for Black Americans went from 20.5 per 100,000 in 2019 to 30.4 in 2021. That was the widest racial gap in decades. In 2023, Black Americans were about 13.7% of the population but 53.8% of homicide victims.

Those aren't just statistics. Each one is a person: someone's son, mother, or best friend from down the block.

What 2025 tells us

In August 2026, the FBI released its full 2025 crime report. Here's the headline: murder fell an estimated 18.1% in one year. The national murder rate dropped to 4.1 per 100,000 people. That ties 1955 and 1956 for the lowest murder rate on record.

Let that sink in. After the worst spike in modern memory, the country is now at a record-low murder rate.

It wasn't just murder. The FBI estimates robbery fell 18.5% and aggravated assault fell 7.2%.

The Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS) works from the same police-reported data with its own estimation methods. It found about 14,660 homicides in 2025, down from 17,720 in 2024. That's roughly three thousand fewer people killed in a single year.

Here's the part I most want you to hear. BJS breaks victimization down by race, and the homicide victimization rate for Black Americans fell from 18.4 to 14.6 per 100,000 in one year, a drop of about 21%. The overall violent victimization rate for Black Americans fell too, from 874.7 to 769.7 per 100,000. BJS reports these declines as statistically significant. That means they're real changes, not noise.

When violence falls, the people most exposed to it benefit the most. That's what happened in 2025.

And 2026 so far

The Council on Criminal Justice (CCJ) tracks crime in large cities that publish their data quickly. Its mid-year 2026 report found that homicide in 30 cities was 18% lower in the first half of 2026 than in the first half of 2025. That's 215 fewer homicides in those cities alone.

Compared with the first half of 2019, before the pandemic, homicide was 31% lower. Compared with the recent peak in 2022, it was 51% lower. That's half. Every month of 2026 through June came in below the same month in 2025. Gun assaults were down 6%, and robbery was down 17%.

CCJ expects the 2026 national homicide rate to set another historic low.

There's another piece of good news that doesn't get enough attention. CCJ reports that the national homicide clearance rate, meaning the share of homicides solved, rose from 50% in 2021 to 69% in 2025. That's the highest since 1988. When more cases get solved, families get answers, and people who would keep hurting others are less likely to stay on the street.

The part we can't skip

Now the honest part.

The gap hasn't closed. Even at these lower levels, the 2025 BJS figures show a Black homicide victimization rate of 14.6 per 100,000, compared with 2.0 for white Americans. That's still about seven times higher. A falling tide is lifting everyone, but it hasn't changed who is standing in the deepest water.

Not every city is moving the same way. Homicide fell in 21 of CCJ's 30 cities in the first half of 2026, but it rose in some. Norfolk was up 64%, San Francisco 55%, Dallas 30%, and Salt Lake City 20%. National averages can hide places that are hurting.

Some kinds of violence are rising. CCJ found domestic violence incidents up 8% and sexual assaults up 3% in the first half of 2026. That violence happens behind closed doors, and it deserves just as much attention.

Half a year isn't a whole year. The 2026 numbers come from a sample of cities, and partial-year data can shift. I'm hopeful, but I'm not counting chickens.

We don't have the full race picture for 2025 or 2026 yet. CDC death-certificate data for 2025 by race isn't published in final form. A tabulation of FBI 2025 homicide data by americanfactbook.org shows that about half of reported victims (50.5%) were Black. The FBI reports behind it count victims and offenders separately, though, so they don't yet tell us who killed whom. For 2026 there's no race breakdown at all yet. I'd rather tell you that plainly than guess.

About the phrase "Black-on-Black crime"

You've heard the phrase. Here's what the data actually says. Most homicide happens within the same race for every group. In 2023 FBI data, counting cases with one victim, one offender, and known race, about 85% of Black victims and 77% of white victims were killed by someone of their own race.

Why? Violence happens mostly among people who live near each other and know each other. American neighborhoods are still heavily segregated. Nobody talks about "white-on-white crime," but that pattern is nearly as strong.

Research ties high violence to concentrated disadvantage: poverty, joblessness, disinvestment, and few institutions. It isn't tied to race itself. Segregation placed many Black neighborhoods in exactly those conditions. Even within high-crime cities, violence is concentrated in a small number of blocks and a small number of people. That's actually hopeful, because it means the problem is focused enough to work on.

What's working (as far as we can tell)

I want to be careful here, because the researchers are careful. CCJ lists several possible contributors to the decline: recovery from pandemic disruption, better investigations, focused enforcement, and community violence intervention. It also cautions that the causes haven't been proven yet.

Community violence intervention, or CVI, includes several approaches:

• Street outreach, like Cure Violence and Advance Peace, where trusted people from the neighborhood step in before a conflict turns deadly.
• Hospital-based programs that reach shooting victims at the bedside, when the risk of retaliation is highest.
• Focused deterrence, like Group Violence Intervention, which pairs a clear message with real offers of help to the small number of people most at risk.

Federal funding for CVI grew after 2021 through the American Rescue Plan and the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act. Evaluations of individual programs are mixed but often promising.

And that rising clearance rate, 69% in 2025, suggests that solving cases matters too.

How I'm choosing to ride out the year

So where does that leave us for the last stretch of 2026?

Here's what I believe the evidence supports. The progress is real. It shows up in police counts, in federal victim estimates, and in city-by-city tracking. Those are three different sources pointing the same direction. It's not one good month. It's a multi-year turn.

The people who suffered most are gaining most. A 21% drop in the Black homicide victimization rate in a single year means families still whole who otherwise wouldn't be.

And the gap is still there. Seven to one. That's not a reason to despair. It's a reason to keep going. The work that seems to help shouldn't be cut just because the numbers look better. That means outreach workers, hospital programs, investigations that solve cases, and investment in the hardest-hit blocks. Good numbers are a reason to protect that work.

If you live in one of the neighborhoods where it's gotten quieter, notice it. Thank the people who've been doing the unglamorous work. And if you live somewhere it hasn't gotten better yet, know that the national trend says change is possible. It's happening right now, in a lot of places that looked hopeless five years ago.

Let's finish the year looking out for each other. The data says it matters.

— Ronnie

---

Sources

• FBI, FBI Releases 2025 Reported Crimes in the Nation Statistics (Aug 14, 2026): https://www.fbi.gov/news/press-releases/fbi-releases-2025-reported-crimes-in-the-nation-statistics
• FBI, UCR Summary of Reported Crimes in the Nation, 2025: https://cde.ucr.cjis.gov/LATEST/resources/reports/UCR_Summary_of_Reported_Crimes_in_the_Nation_2025.pdf
• Bureau of Justice Statistics, Crime Known to Law Enforcement, 2025: https://bjs.ojp.gov/document/ckle25.pdf
• Council on Criminal Justice, Crime Trends in U.S. Cities: Mid-Year 2026 Update: https://counciloncj.org/crime-trends-in-u-s-cities-mid-year-2026-update/
• Council on Criminal Justice, Trends in Homicide: What You Need to Know: https://counciloncj.org/homicide-trends-report/
• Council on Criminal Justice, What's Driving the Drop in Homicide?: https://counciloncj.org/whats-driving-the-drop-in-homicide-how-low-might-it-go/
• American Factbook, tabulation of FBI Supplementary Homicide Reports, 2025: https://americanfactbook.org/crime/homicide-victims
• CDC MMWR, Firearm Homicide Rates by Race and Ethnicity, 2019–2022: https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/72/wr/mm7242a4.htm
• Violence Policy Center, Black Homicide Victimization in the United States (2023 data): https://vpc.org/studies/blackhomicide25.pdf
• OpenCrime, Homicide Demographics 2023 (FBI SHR tabulation): https://www.opencrime.us/homicide-demographics

Listen to the audio version in the Rock U song list

---

This article was written with AI assistance and reviewed by Ronnie Patterson. Figures come from the sources listed above; where data was not yet available, the article says so.

By Ronnie Patterson. Narrated with AI assistance.