Minutes into New Year’s Day, a teenage boy was shot and wounded in the leg in St. Louis. A few minutes later, four people where shot in a different neighborhood, three fatally. By morning, the police were investigating 10 shootings, including five deaths, across the city. The violence was not limited to St. Louis, which in 2017 had the nation’s highest murder rate, the New York Times reports. Gunfire echoed across the U.S. in shootings from Michigan to Texas. In Cleveland, a man who was firing off rounds to celebrate the new year accidentally killed his girlfriend. Near Orlando, two men were killed in a shooting inside a nightclub.
New Year’s Day typically sees an uptick in gun violence and injuries, attributed to a combination of alcohol use and celebratory gunfire. Even as police nationwide were investigating a spate of New Years Day shootings, some cities were marking progress. San Francisco had just 41 murders last year, its lowest number in more than half a century. Los Angeles also had drops in crime last year. Chicago, which has been home to some of the highest rates of violence in the U.S., said it closed 2019 with the lowest number of murders in four years: 492. That’s a 13 percent drop from 2018. Murders have declined steadily in Chicago since 2016, when 778 people were killed. Despite the epidemic of mass shootings, violent crime nationwide has been on the decline over the past quarter century, according to the Pew Research Center. Major cities like New York and Los Angeles have experienced sharp declines in murder and violent crime generally. In some other cities, murder rates have remained stubbornly high.