ST. LOUIS — Homicides and other major crime dropped last year in St. Louis, city leaders announced Tuesday.

The number of murders declined about 6%, from 160 in 2023 to 150 last year, the lowest in more than a decade. Crime overall dropped 15%, officials said.

"While we've seen remarkable progress, 150 homicides in one year is still far too many," Mayor Tishaura O. Jones said at a press conference. "And we're committed to using every tool available to us to bring that number down even further."

This was the second straight year murders fell in St. Louis, with a 21% decrease a year earlier.

The local declines mirror crime trends seen across the country last year.

The St. Louis County Police Department, for instance, similarly saw crime decrease across most major categories. Murder dropped 17% to 29 from 35 in 2023, and down from a peak of 48 in 2020.

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But, in St. Louis, while the number of murders fell last year, the number of shootings actually grew. Data from the police department's CompStat system shows there had been 674 shooting victims through Dec. 29, compared with 643 in 2023.

And, nationally, totals through October showed that murders were on pace to fall last year even more than they did in St. Louis — 16% versus 6% — according to the Real-Time Crime Index, a tool from New Orleans-based consultants AH Datalytics using data from more than 300 U.S. police departments.

"It will probably be the largest one-year reduction in murder and gun violence ever recorded," said Jeff Asher, the founder of AH Datalytics.

The dips come after a historic surge.

Murders began rising in St. Louis in 2014, the year Michael Brown was killed by a Ferguson police officer. They surged in 2020 to historic levels across the nation and here, where they peaked at 264.

Experts remain divided on why. Some have pointed to the killing of George Floyd by Minneapolis police in 2020 as a key factor, suggesting the surge was a response to the killing, or that it was due to police restraining themselves in response to protests after Floyd's death.

But, in a report released last month, researchers at the nonpartisan thinktank the Brookings Institution said the "national homicide rate was already on track to reach a peak far above the previous year even before Floyd was killed."

Instead, they argue, the 2020 murder spike was directly connected to pandemic-year unemployment and school shutdowns in low-income areas, and that the persistence of these conditions explain why murder totals remained high through 2022 and began to fall the next two years.

On Tuesday, Mayor Jones, Police Chief Robert Tracy and Circuit Attorney Gabe Gore announced the data at a news conference at the Delmar Divine mixed-use development on Delmar Boulevard.

Tracy credited various reasons for the decline here last year, including the increased use of technology such as ShotSpotter that uses microphones to pinpoint gunfire.

He also cited violence prevention efforts and youth services initiatives "and the overall holistic approach that we're taking" in the Jones administration.

Asked about the increase in shootings, Tracy noted that the bump followed a decrease in prior years and said the numbers in that category can fluctuate. He also noted that the number of juvenile shooting victims had declined, to 63 last year from 67 in 2023.

Overall, crime across key categories — including murder, sexual assault, robbery, aggravated assault, felony theft and auto theft — dropped to 13,026 incidents last year from 15,343 in 2023.

Just one of those major categories, burglary, went up.

Tracy attributed that in part to a string of business burglaries across the city; five suspects are alleged to have been involved in many of them.

Jones, who is seeking reelection to a second term this year, reiterated her view that various tactics are needed to cut crime.

"Reducing crime means preventing it before it happens, intervening with those who are engaged and enforcing the law to the fullest extent," she said.

Looking ahead, she and Tracy also cited the regional Save Lives Now initiative, which aims to cut homicides across the metro area over the next three years.

One of Jones’ opponents in the March 4 mayoral primary, Recorder of Deeds Michael Butler, said in a text message that “many in the public don’t believe the mayor’s crime stats, nor do they feel them in their neighborhood.”

He said although he doesn’t dispute their validity, his point is that crime remains a major problem in the city.

The other two candidates, Alderwoman Cara Spencer and business executive Andrew Jones, could not be reached for comment.

The St. Louis Post-Dispatch tracks the data behind reported homicides on an interactive map that allows readers to explore information in various ways.

Explore the homicide tracker .

HOMICIDES IN ST. LOUIS, 1970-2024

We calculated the homicide rate based on the total number of homicides reported by the St. Louis Metropolitan Police Department, our archives, and U.S. Census population estimates.

The total number of homicides in St. Louis hit a historic high of 267 in 1993. But the population of the city then was much higher than it is today, and the homicide rate was 69 per 100,000 people.

The total number of homicides hit 263 in the pandemic year of 2020, giving a city with a much smaller population its highest-ever rate, 87.2 per 100,000 people.

* This table was updated to reflect revisions in the 2021, 2022 and 2023 homicide totals by SLMPD.

** The 2024 rate is based on the 2023 population estimate, released on March 14, 2024. The 2024 population estimate will be released in March 2025.

Sources: St. Louis Post-Dispatch archives; St. Louis Metropolitan Police Department; U.S. Census.

Updated Jan. 14, 2025.

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