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Fact check: What are the top 5 US cities with the highest murder rates in 2024?
Executive Summary
The available analyses disagree on a single, authoritative top-five list of U.S. cities with the highest murder rates in 2024 because different datasets and methods produce different rankings; claims include Chicago, Memphis, Los Angeles, St. Louis, Baltimore, Detroit, Philadelphia, and Louisville at various positions. The most authoritative national aggregates (FBI and Council on Criminal Justice) report broad declines in murder in 2024 but still show large city-to-city variation, meaning no single provided source conclusively establishes one universally accepted top-five list for 2024 [1] [2] [3].
1. Conflicting Claim: Chicago Tops the 2024 Homicide List — Where That Came From and Why It Matters
One widely circulated list asserts that Chicago is the city with the highest murder rate in 2024, followed by Memphis, Los Angeles, St. Louis, and Baltimore; this list appears in a June 2024 compilation of “30 US Cities With Highest Homicide Rates,” which mixes municipal counts and per-capita rates and presents Chicago at the top [4]. That compilation’s methodology is not reproduced here, and its mid-2024 date means it may rely on preliminary or partial-year figures; when lists combine raw counts, differing population denominators and reporting completeness can inflate or deflate ranks, so the claim that Chicago “has the highest rate” depends on those methodological choices [4].
2. Contradiction from a Criminal-justice Study: St. Louis Claimed Highest Rate in 2024
A January 2025 study by the Council on Criminal Justice counters the earlier list by identifying St. Louis as having the highest homicide rate in 2024, at 48.6 per 100,000, with Detroit and Baltimore following at substantially lower per-capita levels; that study presents an explicit rate-based ranking rather than an unadjusted count [3]. Because per-capita metrics control for city population size, this source uses a different, often-preferred approach for cross-city comparisons, and its January 2025 publication date means it may incorporate more complete 2024 data than a mid-2024 list, explaining at least part of the disagreement [3].
3. New FBI Data Introduces Louisville as a Top Contender — What Changed
Recent FBI homicide data referenced in September 2025 indicates Louisville had more people killed per capita in 2024 than Chicago or Los Angeles, identifying Louisville as a noteworthy outlier in 2024’s per-capita comparisons [5]. The FBI’s national tallies are broader and compiled from law-enforcement submissions; when municipal reporting completeness, city boundary definitions, and temporal cutoffs vary, an FBI-based ranking can move cities like Louisville into or out of a top-five list compared with other sources, reinforcing that results hinge on the dataset used [5].
4. What the FBI’s Nationwide Numbers Say — Decline in Murders but No Single City List
The FBI’s Reported Crimes in the Nation statistics for 2024 emphasize national trends — an estimated 14.9% decrease in murders and a murder every 31.1 minutes — rather than providing an explicit top-five city ranking [2] [1]. Quarterly FBI releases also showed sizable year-to-date declines in violent crime and homicides through mid-2024, which complicates year-end city rankings because cities experienced heterogeneous year-to-year shifts; a national decline does not imply uniform declines across large metropolitan areas [6] [2].
5. How Methodology, Timing, and Geography Drive Different Top-5 Lists
The divergent top-five lists arise from three methodological differences: whether rankings use raw counts versus per-capita rates; which source’s completeness and cutoff dates are used (mid-2024 snapshots versus full-year 2024 compilations); and how city boundaries or metro areas are defined, which can add or subtract populations and incidents. The June 2024 30-city compilation likely used different inputs than the Council on Criminal Justice’s January 2025 study and the FBI’s later data, so each dataset produces plausible but distinct top-five lists [4] [3] [5].
6. Bottom Line — No Single Agreed Top-Five; Several Cities Recur Across Sources
Across the supplied analyses, a small set of cities repeatedly appears among the highest homicide rates in 2024 — St. Louis, Baltimore, Detroit, Chicago, Memphis, Los Angeles, Philadelphia, and Louisville — but their order varies by source and metric [4] [3] [5]. For readers seeking a defensible top-five ranking, the best practice is to choose a single well-documented methodology (rate per 100,000, clear city boundaries, full-year official counts) and then use the FBI or a criminal-justice research center compilation for comparability; absent that common standard, claims that a specific city is “the highest” remain contingent on the source cited [1] [3].
7. Recommendations for Interpretation and Further Verification
To verify a definitive 2024 top-five list, obtain full-year, city-by-city homicide counts and population denominators from the FBI’s final 2024 Reported Crimes in the Nation and compare them with rate-based studies such as the Council on Criminal Justice; doing so will reveal precisely which five cities top the list under a given methodology. Given the supplied documents’ differing dates and approaches, treat any single published “top five” as provisional unless it cites clear per-capita calculations, city definitions, and final-year data [1] [3] [5].