According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the age-adjusted national homicide death rate rose 30% in 2020, which was a new high. It then rose another 5% in 2021. With 8.2 deaths per 100,000 people, the murder rate in 2021 was 55% higher than it had been ten years before. Even so, the murder rate in the US is still lower than it was at its highest point in the 1970s and early 1990s.
For the CDC, “homicide” means “injuries inflicted by another person with intent to injure or kill, by any means.” This is different from suicide, war, or police officers acting in the line of duty. The number of murders per 100,000 people is used to figure out rates. This lets you compare the number of murders in towns and states with different populations. The CDC also gives out age-adjusted data, which is a more true way to compare groups of people over time than just using raw death rates.
Highest Murder Rate States
These five states had the highest rates of murder:
- Mississippi
- Louisiana
- Alabama
- New Mexico
- South Carolina
Lowest Murder Rate States
These five states had the lowest rates of murder:
- New Hampshire
- Vermont
- Wyoming
- Maine
- Idaho
Washington, DC had a higher murder death rate than any other state (33.3 homicide deaths per 100,000 people), but it’s not really a state; because of how densely populated it is, it’s more like a county in a big city. When age isn’t taken into account, Washington, DC has the seventh-highest crude murder death rate, following the counties that are home to St. Louis, Missouri; New Orleans, Louisiana; Baltimore, Maryland; Memphis, Tennessee; Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; and Richmond, Virginia.
Murder Rates has Been Changed Over Time
The national murder rate has gone down since the early 1990s, when it was 9.9 per 100,000 people. It is now 7.8 per 100,000 people. The US murder rate rose from 6.0 in 2019 to 7.8 in 2020, which was the biggest single-year rise in modern history. The previous highest annual rise was 20%, from 2000 (5.9) to 2001 (7.1), which the CDC says was caused by the September 11 terrorist strikes.
Government Agencies Report on Homicide
The CDC and FBI are the two main places where the federal government gets information on murders. The two agencies use slightly different definitions of homicide and different ways to gather and look at their statistics. In the past, their yearly numbers and trends have been similar.
The FBI includes homicide in its crime records, which lets you compare crime rates. The CDC includes homicide as a cause of death, which lets you compare death rates. USAFacts uses CDC data because it is more detailed and stays the same over time. Standardized death records, which usually have medical information entered by coroners or medical examiners, are how the CDC gets information on murders.
The FBI, on the other hand, depends on local police forces reporting crime information on their own, which many do not do. The FBI also changed the way it collects data in 2021, so you can’t directly compare murder data from 2021 to data from before 2020. Due to low response rates, many police departments have not sent in crime data under the new system. This makes the FBI’s predictions for 2021 inaccurate.