This story was originally published by The Trace, a nonprofit newsroom covering gun violence in America. Sign up for its newsletters here.

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.

Amid presidential rhetoric of “warzones” and “hellholes,” an important data point is being overlooked. The 80 percent of Americans who live in cities will lose far fewer of their neighbors to gun violence this year.

“We’re in an unprecedented moment,” said John Roman, a senior fellow at University of Chicago’s NORC social research center.

“We traditionally say all crime is local,” Roman said. “This is a national story. National forces caused a spike and national forces are the explanation for why violence has declined. That’s a different way of seeing the world than we traditionally do.”

To assess the direction that gun violence is trending in various cities, the Data Hub analyzed the Gun Violence Archive, a dataset that collects public reports of shootings from sources like media reports and city crime dashboards. We fit a trendline to each city to isolate long-term underlying changes from expected seasonal ups and downs in gun violence and temporary blips caused by onetime events like the Orlando Pulse nightclub shooting in 2016. In places where the trend line is going up, gun violence is increasing. In places where it’s going down, gun violence is decreasing. The steeper the line, the faster the change is happening. (More details about the methodology are available on the dataset page.)

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.

When these downward trends began, it was unclear at first what might be causing them. Politicians looking at individual city slices of the data have tried to claim credit for local initiatives. 

But the wide swath of cities across the country experiencing sharp declines in gun violence belies this theory, Roman said. 

“The big force, the gravity, is affecting everyone everywhere at the same time,” he said. “You can do better or worse compared to the national trend, but it’s really the national trend that’s the driving factor.”

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.”

The national nature of the phenomenon is largely a result of federal policy, he said.

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?”

The pattern of spike and then a downward trend holds true in the cities the president has called for military intervention in to combat surging violence.

Gun violence is trending downward steeply in Chicago, Baltimore, Memphis, Los Angeles, St. Louis and Oakland. In Portland, despite a recent slight uptick, gun violence is on track to be lower than last year’s totals, after trending down nearly continuously for 86 weeks. New Orleans at one point had 138 consecutive weeks of downward trending gun violence in a row, starting in 2022.

“There’s a really big misconception that our country is run rampant with gun violence, and it’s increasing and everywhere is so dangerous,” said Cassandra Crifasi, co-director of Center for Gun Violence Solutions at Johns Hopkins. “Overall crime has been trending down for a long time. We saw some places spike during Covid but we’re seeing recovery from those spikes.”

“Some places that are talked about as dangerous didn’t even see spikes,” she said.

And 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.

The national nature of the gun violence trend is also bolstered by the downward gun violence trends in large cities in red states.

While it is worth noting that cities in the Deep South, for example, tend to have much higher rates of per-capita gun violence than cities in the blue states on the coasts, many of them have seen violence spike and then sharply decline in recent years, just like cities everywhere else.

The way forward

With federal funding sunsetting, and political realities at the national level, experts and community members fear all this movement in a positive direction could be reversed.

“Many of the places that had meaningful reductions in gun violence, saw them because they have made more investments in response to gun violence,” Crifasi said. “ Community violence intervention programs, cleaning and clearing vacant lots, investing in people and places that experience gun violence.”

Cities and counties will have to get creative and step up to ensure funding is available, she said. For example, Oakland, California, recently passed a ballot measure calling for a tax increase to support community violence intervention programs and the police department. Private foundations could also contribute toward sustaining the progress made in so many cities, Crifasi added.

And many cities will receive opioid settlement funds that could tangentially impact gun violence because drugs and gun violence are so intertwined.

“We’re spending money on gun violence already,” Crifasi said. “Just how do we want to spend it? Making our community safe or dealing with violence after it’s happened?”

Meanwhile, federal funding or no, the African American communities so affected by gun violence will do what they have ever done and commence the often uncompensated labor of saving lives, said Kevin Angelo, an assistant criminology professor at Arkansas State University.

“Programs like CeaseFire started with volunteers,” Angelo said. “People want to be involved. If a program has been implemented with the community and been accepted, people will show up and take part.”