Which US Cities Are Seeing Crime Rise vs. Fall in 2026

The national narrative says crime is falling — and by aggregate measures, that's true. But when you look at real-time incident data from individual cities, the picture fractures into something far more complicated. Some metros are still absorbing gunfire at rates that would have been front-page news five years ago. Others have achieved declines that feel almost implausible. Here's what the data actually shows in 2026 — and why city-level granularity is the only honest lens.

The National Story Is Real — And Misleading

Violent crime in America has been falling for two consecutive years at a pace that surprised even the most optimistic criminologists. Homicides declined roughly 15% in 2024 and an estimated 18-20% further in 2025, placing the national murder rate at levels not seen since the early 1960s. The FBI Crime Data Explorer and the Real-Time Crime Index — which aggregates self-reported crime data from hundreds of law enforcement agencies nationwide — both confirm the direction of travel.

This is meaningful progress. But national crime statistics are, in a very practical sense, useless for making decisions about specific places. A family evaluating a move to Baltimore doesn't care that violent crime fell in Phoenix. A developer building a neighborhood safety feature for a real estate platform can't serve their users with a national average. A corporate security team assessing risk for executives traveling to Indianapolis needs city-level data, not a country-level headline.

The divergence between what national statistics report and what individual cities experience is the central problem with how crime data is consumed in 2026. And the gap is growing wider, not narrower.

What 6,501 Shootings in 60 Days Reveals

SpotCrime's companion tool shootingsnear.me tracks shooting incidents in real time across select US cities, pulling from verified law enforcement data and incident feeds. Over the most recent 60-day window, the platform recorded 6,501 shooting incidents across 12 cities. That number alone is striking — but the distribution is where things get genuinely revealing.

Here is the full city breakdown for that period:

Two things jump out immediately, and both deserve explanation.

The Seattle Number — What It Means and What It Doesn't

Seattle leading this list with 1,276 incidents will surprise people whose mental model of American gun violence centers on legacy high-crime cities. It surprised us too when the data first surfaced. A few things are worth understanding before drawing hard conclusions.

First, “shooting incident” definitions vary by jurisdiction. Seattle's reporting methodology, as pulled into the shootingsnear.me feed, captures a broader category of gun-related incidents than some other cities in the dataset — including shots-fired calls that didn't result in injuries. This reflects a genuine public safety reality (gun discharges in populated areas matter regardless of injury outcome), but it makes direct cross-city comparisons imprecise if taken at face value.

Second, Seattle has seen a documented deterioration in neighborhood safety conditions in certain corridors since 2023. The city's data transparency infrastructure — its willingness to report and categorize incidents — is actually better than many comparable metros. You see higher numbers partly because you're seeing more of the actual picture.

Third, the Pacific Northwest broadly, including Portland and Seattle, has had a measurably harder time bending the curve on street-level violence compared to Midwest and South metros that have invested heavily in violence intervention programs since 2021.

None of this excuses 21 shooting incidents per day. It contextualizes the data so analysts and developers can build with it accurately rather than treating the raw number as a simple rank.

The Chicago Paradox: Why the Nation's Most Watched City Ranks Last

Chicago appearing at the bottom of this list — 218 incidents over 60 days, fewer than Seattle, San Antonio, Baltimore, Indianapolis, Las Vegas, and six other cities — will read as counterintuitive to anyone who has consumed American crime media for the past decade.

It is not a data error. Chicago's homicide numbers have genuinely fallen — dramatically — since 2021. The city recorded more than 800 murders in 2021. By 2025, that figure had dropped to roughly 450, a decline of nearly 45% in four years. The trend is real, and it reflects a combination of factors: expanded street outreach programs, improved community violence intervention (CVI) infrastructure, demographic shifts in the age cohort historically most at risk, and — controversially — changes in reporting thresholds.

The Chicago data point in shootingsnear.me also reflects the city's specific reporting pipeline and the incident types captured in its feed. As with Seattle, the methodology matters. What the data does confirm is a trajectory: Chicago is trending meaningfully downward on gun violence in ways that most national media coverage has been slow to reflect.

Indianapolis and Baltimore — both in the middle of the shootingsnear.me table — tell a different story. Both cities have seen sustained per-capita rates of gun violence that remain among the highest in the country when adjusted for population. Indianapolis's 741 incidents over 60 days, against a metro population roughly one-tenth of Chicago's, implies a per-capita exposure that makes it one of the most dangerous gun violence environments in the dataset.

What the Real-Time Crime Index Shows That the FBI Won't

The Real-Time Crime Index (RTCI) aggregates self-reported incident data from hundreds of law enforcement agencies and publishes it with far less lag than the FBI's Uniform Crime Report — which typically arrives 12-18 months after the events it covers. For trend analysis in 2026, the RTCI is the closest thing to a national pulse on crime movements as they happen.

What the RTCI consistently reveals is a widening gap between agencies with strong data reporting infrastructure and those without. Cities that invest in modern records management systems — and that have political incentives to be transparent about crime data — show up clearly in the index. Cities that don't, or that face internal pressure to suppress unflattering numbers, create gaps in the national picture.

This is not a minor data quality footnote. It is the central reason why real estate platforms, insurance underwriters, corporate security teams, and family safety apps cannot rely on government-published crime data alone. SpotCrime has been making this argument — and building the infrastructure to address it — for years. The LAPD's decision to stop releasing detailed crime location data in early 2025, which led to SpotCrime's ongoing lawsuit against the department, is the most visible recent example of exactly this problem.

When agencies go dark, the data gap doesn't mean crime stopped happening. It means the public — and the platforms that serve them — lose visibility into what's real.

Why Trend Data Beats Point-in-Time Snapshots

The most valuable crime data for any practical application is not today's incident count. It's the 36-month trend line. A neighborhood with 200 incidents this month and 350 twelve months ago is improving. A neighborhood with 200 incidents this month and 80 twelve months ago is deteriorating fast. The raw number is the same; the trajectory is completely different, and trajectory is what drives decisions.

This is why single-point crime scores — the kind produced by ZIP-code averages or annual FBI summaries — are inadequate for serious applications. They capture a static moment in a dynamic process. A real estate platform that shows buyers only a current crime score is giving them a photograph when they need a video.

• Buyers evaluating neighborhoods want to know whether safety is improving or eroding over time
• Insurance underwriters need to detect emerging risk corridors before claims spike
• Corporate security teams need to assess whether a city is on a worsening trajectory before committing to office leases or executive travel
• Family safety apps need to surface real-time alerts within the context of a location's baseline — is this incident unusual, or is it consistent with normal activity for this block?

SpotCrime's API provides 36 months of historical incident data at the address level — not just the census tract or ZIP code. That depth of trend data is what separates actionable crime intelligence from noise.

What Developers and Platforms Should Actually Build With This

The shootingsnear.me data illustrates a principle that applies broadly across crime data product development: the most valuable applications don't just display incident counts. They interpret them.

A developer building a neighborhood safety feature should be asking: what is the 90-day trend for this address? How does this block compare to the surrounding census tract? Is this location near a known crime hotspot, or is it an anomaly in an otherwise low-incident area? What is the SpotScore™ safety rating for this address, and how has it moved over the last year?

These are the questions that produce useful answers for end users — whether those users are homebuyers, renters, property managers, insurance adjusters, or parents checking a school's surrounding blocks.

For developers specifically, the right architecture treats crime data as an enrichment layer — something that sits alongside address, demographic, and market data to build a more complete picture of a location. The SpotCrime API is designed to slot into that stack cleanly, with endpoints that return incident data, trend summaries, and SpotScore™ ratings in a consistent format across all 22,000+ US cities in the coverage area.

The Cities to Watch in the Second Half of 2026

Based on trajectory data and current incident feeds, several cities are worth watching as 2026 progresses. San Antonio's position at second in the shootingsnear.me dataset is worth monitoring — the city has grown fast, and its law enforcement infrastructure has consistently lagged that growth. If incident rates hold through mid-year, San Antonio risks becoming the city that displaces older high-crime metros in the national conversation.

New Orleans, at 411 incidents over 60 days, sits in a particularly precarious position. The city's population has shrunk significantly since Hurricane Katrina, which means its per-capita violence rate is higher than the raw incident count implies. Ongoing political disputes over police department oversight and consent decree compliance have created real institutional uncertainty that tends to precede deteriorating data transparency — exactly the dynamic that made the LAPD situation possible.

Detroit's 329 incidents represent a story of genuine improvement relative to where the city was five years ago. Per-capita gun violence in Detroit has fallen substantially, driven in part by population stabilization, economic investment in specific neighborhoods, and a violence interruption infrastructure that has matured over the last decade. It remains elevated by national standards, but the trajectory is one of the more encouraging in the dataset.

The Bottom Line for Anyone Building With Crime Data

The 2026 crime data landscape rewards granularity and punishes averages. National trends are real — violent crime is down — but they are almost entirely irrelevant to the specific decisions that developers, platforms, insurers, and individuals are actually making. Those decisions happen at the address level, against a backdrop of city-specific trajectories that the national headline number completely obscures.

The shootingsnear.me data is one window into this reality — a real-time pulse on gun violence in a dozen cities that challenges assumptions, complicates narratives, and demands that anyone working with crime data think harder about methodology, comparability, and what they're actually measuring. The same discipline that makes shootingsnear.me useful is what drives SpotCrime's full API infrastructure: verified data, normalized for geography, tracked over time, and served at the resolution that decisions actually require.

If you're building something that touches neighborhood safety — whether that's a real estate search tool, a family safety app, a corporate security dashboard, or an insurance pricing model — the city-level trends in this post are a starting point. The 36-month address-level history in the SpotCrime API is where the real work begins.