Crime rates continue to decrease in Connecticut’s capital city, according to a Sunday report from the Hartford Courant, which found significant declines in violent crimes like murder and aggravated assault.
“Our shooting numbers are the lowest that we’ve seen on record,” Hartford Mayor Arunan Arulampalam told the Courant following new statistics that revealed a 40% decline in homicides so far this year when compared to the same period in 2024.
Aggravated assaults were also down around 5% while aggravated assaults with a firearm have dropped around 25%, according to the statistics presented in the story.
In fact, crime is down in Hartford nearly across the board: sexual assaults dropped 13%, robberies are down 23%, and auto thefts fell 35% in the first seven months of the year, the Courant reported.
The statistics follow earlier numbers from the National Incident-Based Reporting System, which found that violent crimes dropped in each of Connecticut’s five largest cities from 2023 to 2024. They also mirror national trends which find crime rates dropping around the country, Michael Lawlor, associate professor of criminal justice at the University of New Haven, told the Courant.
Despite falling crime rates, President Donald Trump has cited crime as his reason for deploying National Guard troops to domestic cities like Los Angeles and Washington, D.C.
Both cities were reporting declining crime numbers before Trump’s troop deployments. As of last month, LA was on pace to post its lowest homicide rate in almost 60 years, according to the Times. Meanwhile, violent crime in D.C. recently hit a 30-year low, the U.S. Department of Justice reported earlier this year.
But while the president targets cities in blue states for troop deployments, statistics indicate that cities in Republican-controlled states often have far higher crime rates. A Monday report from Axios found that states like Louisiana, Tennessee, Alabama, Arkansas, and South Carolina were “national leaders in both violent crime and homicide.”
