Data from 2024 shows drop in homicides, serious assaults in CT. Here’s why numbers are down.

Hartford Courant – Monday, January 6, 2025
By Justin Muszynski

Homicides and serious assaults were down across Connecticut in 2024, including in Hartford where officials say they are the lowest they have been in about two decades, according to preliminary data.

The statistics, released by the Connecticut State Police Crimes Analysis Unit, show that there were 63 murders and non-negligent manslaughters throughout the state as of Dec. 26, according to state police. That number plummeted from 137 homicides reported during the same time period in 2023, state police said, noting that the 2024 data is preliminary.

Troopers noted that the 2024 data does not yet meet the standard that the FBI uses for crime tracking, as not all law enforcement agencies throughout the state are up to date on their submissions.

According to the preliminary data through Dec. 18, there were 2,465 aggravated assaults reported throughout Connecticut, compared to 3,068 during the same time period in 2023.

Mike Lawlor, associate professor at the University of New Haven Criminal Justice Department, said he’s not surprised the preliminary numbers show a drop in homicides and serious assaults, as many crimes throughout the state had been trending downward for decades before the COVID-19 pandemic. Following a spike in crime during the pandemic, most crimes have been slowly dipping downward and back to what was considered normal before the virus outbreak, Lawlor said.

“It is the case that especially in the context of violent crime, that the pandemic pushed everything way up,” said Lawlor, who previously served as former Gov. Dannel Malloy’s undersecretary for criminal justice policy and planning in the Office of Policy and Management. “What you’re seeing now is a gradual decline back to where it was pre-pandemic.”

“It’s not surprising that this is happening,” Lawlor continued. “I think law enforcement agencies around the country had gotten pretty good at preventing crime, mainly by good community relations, and good intelligence and stuff like that. That was all interrupted by the pandemic. The cops couldn’t go out and do face-to-face meetings with anybody.”

According to the annual crime report compiled by the state police Crimes Analysis Unit, there were 106 homicides reported in the state in 2019, which jumped to 149 in 2020 and 159 the following year. The data shows homicides then dropped in 2022 to 137 and 136 the next year.

The annual crime report released in 2023 shows the three-year trend of aggravated assaults in the state has been trending downward, with 3,320 serious assaults reported in 2021, followed by 3,083 in 2022 and 3,057 the following year.

According to Lawlor, a majority of homicides and serious assaults are domestic related or targeted attacks over personal disputes, drug-related feuds or another type of quarrel. Most shootings involve young men and are very rarely a random act of violence, he said.

“A lot of these shootings are directly related to what people usually refer to as feuds between different groups,” Lawlor said. “It’s not one group, it’s a bunch of different groups.”

These types of feuds tend to be more of an issue in bigger cities like Hartford, Bridgeport, New Haven, Waterbury and New Britain, Lawlor said.

In Hartford, CompStat report data through Dec. 14 shows that homicides and aggravated assaults in the city were down quite a bit compared to the same time period in 2023. Homicides fell from 35 to 22 in that timeframe, marking a 37% decline. Compared to the 39 homicides in Hartford during the same time period in 2022, the city saw a 44% drop in homicides last year, the data shows.

The 271 aggravated assaults reported in the first 50 weeks or so of 2024 marked a 21% drop from the 345 reported in Hartford in 2023 and a 32% drop from the same time period in 2022, according to CompStat data. The number of shooting victims in the city for most of 2024 dropped 18% compared to the previous year, falling from 95 in 2023 to 78. This marked a 41% drop when comparing the 132 shooting victims in 2022 to the preliminary data from 2024.

“What’s remarkable is there are a number of cities who saw crime spike during COVID which went back down post-COVID, but we are actually lower than pre-COVID numbers when it comes to shootings and homicides,” Hartford Mayor Arunan Arulampalam said. “We’ve got 19 years of stats on shooting numbers and murders in the city of Hartford, and this is by a significant chunk the lowest numbers we’ve had in homicides and shootings in those 19 years. So it’s the lowest we have had really on record and certainly the lowest in about two decades.”

Arulampalam said the efforts to curb violent crime in the city start with the Hartford Police Department and the Crime Center, which he said is among one of the three or four most advanced in the country, combining ShotSpotter technology with a sophisticated video surveillance network. When investigators find video of a crime, Arulampalam said, the solvability of the offense has been found to increase by about 472%.

City officials have also put an increased effort on youth programs and violence intervention by coordinating efforts between advocacy groups and the newly formed Office of Violence Prevention.

“As soon as somebody shows up in the hospital with gunshot wounds, violence intervention professionals are on the scene immediately and connect with all the members of the family and friends and work to address the trauma in those individuals’ lives and set them on a pathway toward making choices that don’t lead to retaliation,” Arulampalam said. “And that’s had a real impact on our crime stats.

“Hartford has really been at the forefront of showing that you can make an impact when you work together between the police department and the community,” said Arulampalam, who announced in April that the city would be forming the Office of Violence Prevention.

The number of violent acts in a city has a “huge impact on the way that residents feel about their community and the safety they feel,” Arulampalam said.

“It is an unconscionable thing that as a country we lose so many people to gun violence every year,” he continued. “Every time I have to talk to a mother who’s lost a child or go to a funeral for someone that was a victim of senseless gun violence, it reminds me of the commitment I made when I was campaigning to try to make a real impact on gun violence in the city. It has so many layers of impact on so many lives.”

“I think like a lot of mayors I take it really personally every time someone’s shot in my city,” Arulampalam said.

CompStat data from New Haven through Dec. 22 shows that the city saw a 39% drop in homicides in 2024 compared to the same time period in 2023, falling from 23 homicides to 14. And while Mayor Justin Elicker said he’s encouraged by the drop, he acknowledged that there’s a certain element of luck involved in whether a shooting victim lives or dies.

Elicker said officials tracking gun violence in the city look closely at the number of homicides as well as assaults involving a firearm and the number of shots fired incidents. CompStat data shows New Haven saw an increase in the number of shooting victims from 2023 to 2024, which climbed from 76 to 89, representing a rise of about 17%. The number of shots fired incidents from 2023 to 2024, however, dropped about 33%, falling from 272 incidents to 182, the data shows.

When combining all gun-related categories in New Haven, the city saw a drop from 371 incidents involving firearms to 285, Elicker said.

“So I think that’s generally a better metric of how we’re doing as far as gun violence goes,” Elicker said.

Like Hartford, leadership in New Haven has also put an emphasis on violence intervention and youth programs, according to Elicker. The goal of the outreach efforts has been to reach those who are most likely to be subjected to violence and those who are at risk for committing retaliatory acts. Officials have also increased the number of cameras in the city and reached a contract with the police department that includes a significant pay increase for officers, allowing the city to attract and retain more police, Elicker said.

“I’m encouraged that the numbers are going in the right direction, but it is not time to take a victory lap,” Elicker said. “We have a lot more work to do, especially thinking about the fact that we lost Uzziah Shell and Daily Jackson, a 16-year-old and a 17-year-old, in the past month and a half.”

“Almost all of the violence we see is people that know each other, and it’s primarily two kinds of different categories,” Elicker said.

The first is domestic violence and the other involves groups of individuals engaged in ongoing feuds.

“People that have beefs with each other, and that’s everything from a dispute over a girl or a dispute over money or a dispute over some sort of fight that someone had,” Elicker said “Or often times a dispute where someone shot my friend and I want to get that person back.”

Many of the guns used in these violent acts are later found to have been purchased out of state where the gun laws are not as strict as in Connecticut. That component is out of the control of city and state officials, so Elicker said New Haven leadership has made a concerted effort to reach individuals who are at most at risk for heading down a path to crime, including those who have formally been incarcerated.

A number of programs help connect these at-risk individuals with resources to things like housing and employment to “ensure that they have no reason to choose a criminal pathway.”

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