NEW ORLEANS (WVUE) – After the halfway point of 2025, New Orleans’ crime level is at historic lows with the city seeing one of its lowest murder counts at this point in the year since the 1960s.
As of July 14, the New Orleans Police Department has recorded 55 murders in 2025.
“You’re talking about one of the lowest levels in 50-something years,” crime data analyst Jeff Asher said.
Asher is co-founder of New Orleans data company AH Datalytics. His team says the murder total the city has seen thus far is historically low, especially given it includes the 14 lives lost in the New Year’s Day terror attack on Bourbon Street.
“We’re seeing very positive results right now, and your odds of being a crime victim have gone down substantially,” Asher said.
Asher says his company takes crime data straight from NOPD and can pinpoint that New Orleans’ murder decline began around February 2023, when the city saw 266 murders in a 12-month span.
It was also during a timespan when NOPD was dealing with high property crimes citywide and an increase in other violent crimes.
AH Datalytics reports there was a gradual decline in the city’s murder count until New Orleans reaches the number it has now — 102 murders in a 12-month span.
Other crimes such as auto theft, carjackings and vehicle burglaries are down more than 30 percent compared to this time last year. AH Datalytics says that the city’s violent crime is down from a peak of 9,272 crimes in a 12-month period starting in February 2022 and property crime peaked in February 2020 with 49,350 crimes in a 12-month span.
“Portions of the city where residents have complained about the level of crime, even property crime, are seeing dramatic declines in those types of crimes,” Asher said.
Pinpointing exactly what led to the crime decline is tough for Asher. He says the decline started before current NOPD Supt. Anne Kirkpatrick took over the department and before the creation of Troop NOLA, a Louisiana State Police troop based solely in New Orleans.
But he says that crime started to dip nationally, once municipalities started spending COVID relief funds on their communities.
“Better street lighting is known to reduce violent crime. More jobs means more opportunities. Even if there are city jobs and state jobs and things like that, it means more opportunity. It means less crime,” he said.
Tackling the city’s high crime rate is a priority for Roberta Dubuclet, who leads the city’s Office of Violence Prevention under the New Orleans Health Department.
“We have stated numerous times before that violence is a public health issue,” Dubuclet said. “That has allowed us to sit down with researchers, physicians, community-based partners, public safety workers and make sure everything that we are doing is trauma-informed.”
Dubuclet says her office relies on partnerships with the Violence Intervention Program, Trauma Recovery Center and peace ambassadors with Ubuntu Village to help proactively stop crime and provide resources for crime victims.
“If we are seeing historic lows, this is really years in the making, that we have really been getting our stats and figuring out what’s best for our community,” she said.
She says continued funding for those partner agencies and programs is necessary to keep the crime level low and to push it even lower.
“We are truly blessed to be able to finally start seeing some of the benefit. We are able to keep the violence down in these communities by having sustainability,” she said.
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