Which U.S. cities bucked the 2025 national homicide decline and why, according to local data?
Executive summary
A broad, Council on Criminal Justice (CCJ) data sweep shows 2024-2025-us-city-homicide-rates">homicides fell sharply across most large U.S. cities in 2025, but a small handful bucked that national decline — most consistently named in reporting are Little Rock and Milwaukee, with Fort Worth also singled out by at least one major summary — and other local surveys and county-level compilations flag cities such as Virginia Beach, Omaha, Atlanta and Washington, D.C., as having experienced increases in certain periods or measures [1] [2] [3] [4]. Local officials, police chiefs and analysts offer a mix of proximate explanations — spikes tied to interpersonal conflicts or localized drug-market dynamics, delayed effects of policing shifts, and data-reporting quirks — but the reporting stresses that definitive, single-factor causes are not established in the available sources [5] [2] [1].
1. Which cities bucked the 2025 decline: the short list and how often they appear in the data
The CCJ’s mid-year and year-end analyses and major press summaries converge on a small set of outliers: Little Rock and Milwaukee are repeatedly identified as places with upticks in homicide counts in 2025 relative to 2024, and USA Today’s synopsis adds Fort Worth as another city that saw an increase in the period covered by CCJ’s 35‑city panel [2] [1] [6]. CCJ’s mid‑year note also highlighted Virginia Beach among the largest percentage month‑to‑month increases in one comparison window, and the Major Cities Chiefs Association survey and conservative outlets flagged additional cities — notably Omaha and Atlanta — that reported year‑to‑year increases in one or more violent‑crime categories through September 2025 [2] [3].
2. What local data and officials say about “why” these places diverged
Local explanations in the reporting are granular and varied: Atlanta’s police chief attributed much of the city’s recent progress and remaining volatility to patterns of escalating interpersonal disputes and urged community conflict‑resolution work, suggesting that a handful of disputes can sway year‑over‑year totals in a single city [5]. CCJ’s convened experts, when discussing the national decline, pointed to restored routines, infusion of pandemic relief and programming as broad drivers of the drop — implying that places not seeing these stabilizing forces or with localized disruptions (e.g., shifts in policing, concentrated drug‑market activity, or program rollout delays) could register increases, although CCJ did not ascribe single causes to specific cities [1] [2]. Some local reporting and county compilations also point to data‑definition and jurisdictional mapping — county vs. city counts — that can create the appearance of increases when metrics or geographic frames change [4].
3. Competing narratives, political spin and what the sources warn about
National coverage and think‑tank summaries caution against overinterpreting outliers: CCJ researchers and other analysts repeatedly emphasize uncertainty and the possibility that short‑term reversals reflect noise rather than durable trends, a caveat media reports echo even as political actors seize on local spikes — for example, Washington’s National Guard deployment was cited in reporting as a politically freighted response to crime narratives — underscoring that responses and rhetoric can be driven by agendas as much as by data [1] [6]. Conservative and partisan outlets have amplified surveys showing that “major cities” bucked national declines in some categories, but those surveys cover different time frames and sets of cities (MCCA through September), and thus can overstate the extent of oppositional trends if compared directly to CCJ’s year‑end analyses [3] [6].
4. Data limitations and the responsible takeaway
CCJ’s multi‑city panels and mainstream summaries provide consistent evidence that the 2025 homicide decline was broad and historically large, while noting a few local reversals — Little Rock and Milwaukee most prominently — but the reporting available does not provide exhaustive, causal case‑studies for each outlier, and warns analysts to treat short‑term upticks as potentially volatile and influenced by reporting windows, jurisdictional definitions and local incident concentrations [6] [2] [1]. The most defensible conclusion from the assembled sources is that only a small number of cities bucked the nationwide drop in 2025; local officials point to interpersonal dispute dynamics, localized drug‑market or policing changes, and data quirks as plausible proximate causes, but definitive causal attribution is not established in the cited reporting [5] [4] [2].