Violent crime in New Orleans has fallen to its lowest level since the 1960s, and already, the first half of 2026 has extended the dramatic drop in homicides and shootings.

NOPD recorded 38 murders through June 25, representing one of the lowest year-to-date totals the city has seen in decades. If that pace holds, New Orleans will finish 2026 with about 78 murders, nearly matching the 76 recorded in 1969.

"We've seen a remarkable decline, and it's the kind of thing we should be talking about," said Jeff Asher, cofounder of AH Datalytics, who recently retooled the city's public safety dashboards. "We are reaching 50-, 60-year lows now."

In 1969, though, New Orleans crime was on an upswing, prompting residents to "hide in their homes at night while criminals roam the streets," then-Asst. U.S. Attorney Harry Connick said, according to a report that year by The Times-Picayune. The city's population was 593,471 in 1970.

Today, similar totals mark a welcome milestone in New Orleans' continued decline in violence following a horrific post-pandemic surge that made the city the nation's murder capital in 2022. The downturn began in mid-2023 and has continued each year since.

In 2022, between briefings at the scenes of gruesome killings, New Orleans police held news conferences touting the acquisition of additional crime-scene body screens and celebrating modest slowdowns in the bloodshed.

This year, violent incidents that prompt media briefings have been few and far between. Recent news conferences by NOPD include one at the scene of an unsolved fatal stabbing that happened 45 years ago, and one touting a proactive operation to shut down a planned street "takeover" event in its tracks.

"I'm not going to say we're crime-free. But our crime is very low," said Morgan Clevenger, president of the Fairgrounds Neighborhood Advisory Board and president of the First District Police Community Advisory Board. "We've been really deep in the last several years trying to get a handle on the other big public safety issue: speeding and crashes."

On Tuesday at the NOPD's Gang Reduction and Intervention Partnership meeting, Mayor Helena Moreno congratulated the department and its partners for the sustained crime drop.

NOPD watchdogs echoed those comments.

"I believe this is the most successful span of continuing declines in crime during my 45-year tenure in the criminal justice system," said Rafael Goyeneche, president of the Metropolitan Crime Commission.

By the numbers

The 38 murders represent a 24% decrease from the same time last year, when New Orleans logged 50 killings, including the 14 victims of the New Year's terrorist attack.

NOPD did not provide the locations for the murders, but a Times-Picayune analysis of 35 homicides included in the NOPD's calls-for-service log reveals that Little Woods saw eight killings — more than any other neighborhood. Central City, Mid-City, St. Claude and Treme each notched two killings.

Nonfatal shootings also fell 16%, from 92 to 77.

Rapes and armed robberies, however, ticked up slightly. The city has recorded 258 attempted and completed first-, second- and third-degree rapes this year, up from 256 during the same period in 2025. Armed robberies rose from 109 to 115.

Carjackings saw an increase, from 38 in 2025 to 48 in 2026 — a trend driven at least partially by a teen carjacking scheme that targeted Uber drivers.

Still, the numbers represent an overall drop over the last four years. Armed robberies fell 62%, while carjackings are down 63% compared to the first half of 2023.

Statistics on rapes were unavailable because of complications related to the department's transition from the Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR) system to the National Incident-Based Reporting System (NIBRS).

The decline mirrors a nationwide drop in violence, though New Orleans has once again amplified a national trend to an extreme.

Just as the city posted the nation's highest per-capita murder rate during the post-pandemic surge, it has outpaced nearly every major city during the subsequent decline.

"Our crime trends are still dramatically going down. And we're continuing our full-court press," NOPD superintendent Anne Kirkpatrick said Thursday. "We know our strategies are working, and I hope there's a day we don't have any gun violence in this city."

Shifting strategies

Calls for service have remained essentially unchanged at roughly 98,000 year to date, but reports of violent crimes have fallen 36% over the last three years, from 1,804 calls on June 27, 2023 to 1,148 on June 27, 2026.

The NOPD has shifted strategies to build on the progress.

"The sustained reduction in violent crime has allowed the Department to devote more resources to proactive policing rather than primarily responding to violent incidents," said NOPD director of communications Reese Harper. "Officers now have greater capacity to focus on preventing crime before it occurs."

The department has ramped up traffic enforcement and adopted a targeted approach to identifying and apprehending the handful of individuals driving violent crime. More officers are visible on the street, too, Harper said.

The number of commissioned officers continues to hover around 900 — several hundred short of where Kirkpatrick says the department needs to be.

But federal, state and local partnerships, an expanded civilian workforce, technological advances and an effective, collaborative court system have enabled the diminished force to punch above its weight, Goyeneche said.

The NOPD's ramped-up traffic enforcement has produced sharp increases in stops, citations and drunk-driving arrests this year, while traffic deaths have fallen by nearly a third, from 28 fatalities at this point last year to 19 this year.

In Fairgrounds, Clevenger says the nighttime soundscape has shifted.

"We used to hear gunfire every night," Clevenger said. "We pretty much eliminated that. But now we hear the crashes."

Clevenger says that she and other residents, like NOPD, have "triaged" their attention, focusing on the drag racing that her stretch of North Broad Street has long attracted. But even those events have decreased recently, Clevenger said, pointing to a recent NOPD checkpoint at St. Bernard Avenue and North Broad Street.

"We've seen a 30-40% reduction in ... the takeover-type things," she said.

What does the future hold?

Julia Fleckman, associate professor at Washington University in St. Louis and faculty affiliate at the Tulane University Violence Prevention Institute, who worked with the Vera Institute of Justice and Washington University in St. Louis to build a new firearm violence dashboard, said the tool has yielded insights that could shape future prevention efforts. Among them: Victims often aren't shot in the neighborhoods where they live.

"We have seen a stark decline (in violent crime), and we need to keep investing in neighborhood infrastructure and access to services, education and job training and attainment, so it can stay down," Fleckman said.

Goyeneche predicted even greater gains when the NOPD's Crime Lab adds DNA testing capabilities and if it adopts a drone-as-first-responder program.

"I think we're just scratching the surface on what is possible," he said. "So I’m optimistic. I'm bullish on the future, from a public safety perspective. It's been a long time since I could say that."

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