CCJ hosted the homicide summit at Arizona State University’s School of Criminology and Criminal Justice in Phoenix on September 18-19, 2026. The convening brought together 48 experts to examine possible explanations for the national homicide decline from 2022 through 2026. The summit was moderated by CCJ Senior Fellow and former U.S. Assistant Attorney General Amy Solomon and staffed by CCJ.
The goal of the event was not to establish a definitive cause of the homicide decline or produce consensus. Rather, CCJ sought to bring relevant evidence and expertise to bear on a wide range of plausible explanations for the decline, and gauge the weight of scholarly perspectives about each factor’s contribution to it. Summit participants were drawn from multiple disciplines, including criminology, public health, economics, sociology, social work, and psychology. The intent was to convene a group with a broad range of informed perspectives, not one necessarily representative of all researchers in these fields.
Before the summit, CCJ compiled a list of 43 factors that could plausibly have contributed to the falling homicide rate, drawing on explanations prominent in public debate, relevant research literature, and suggestions from invited participants. Researchers added five additional factors during summit deliberations. Some factors received concise evidence summaries; 14 factors were discussed in longer research briefs, commissioned from leading experts in the field, because they had received greater scholarly attention or public discussion. Whether a factor had a summary or a longer research brief did not indicate that CCJ considered the factor more likely to have contributed to the decline. All 48 considered factors and their associated materials are included later in this report.
Summit participants considered each factor in the context of seven “fit considerations” listed below:
- the mechanism through which it could affect homicide;
- the timing and scale of the relevant change in the factor;
- the geographic reach and affected population of the factor;
- whether evidence of the factor’s impact is specific to homicide and serious violence, rather than related to criminal activity more generally; and,
- if the factor could affect whether violent incidents become fatal.
The process was designed to surface and sharpen differences in judgment, not to engineer agreement.
At the conclusion of the discussions, participants completed a poll designed to assess the contribution of each factor, identify the explanations participants believed had contributed most to the decline, and identify priorities for future research. For each factor, CCJ asked the researchers for their best professional judgment about how much it contributed to the homicide drop between 2022 and 2026, requiring them to choose from “major contribution,” “limited contribution,” or “negligible or no contribution.” Respondents could also indicate that they were unable to make a provisional judgment when they believed the available data or research were insufficient.
The summit was designed to explain a past change, not to produce a forward-looking policy agenda. A factor judged to have contributed to the homicide decline is not necessarily a strategy that policymakers should expand, and a factor judged to have contributed little over the past four years does not necessarily lack value for reducing violence in the years ahead. The findings can help inform future policy by clarifying which explanations researchers consider most plausible, where uncertainty remains, and which questions warrant additional study.
The results that follow represent the collective judgment of these participants at a particular point in time, not definitive causal findings or a representative poll of the field. Multiple factors may also have operated at the same time, with effects that overlapped, interacted, or reinforced one another. Future publications will explore some of these themes in greater depths.
Source: counciloncj.org
