In a bit of good news, the murder rate in the U.S. appears to be down this year compared to trends in the last several years, according to the New York Times.

In the cities in which data is available, murder has been down about 7 percent on average this year relative to the same point in 2017…

If murder falls about 4.5 percent nationally this year, the murder rate of about 5 per 100,000 will roughly be in line with 2009’s rate and half of what it was in 1980, the highest U.S. murder rate on record. The accompanying chart shows what the national murder rate since 1960 would look like with a 4.5 percent drop in 2018.

Tracking the change in murder nationally is far easier than explaining why it’s happening. There is still no consensus on why murder rose nationally in 2015 and 2016, though various theories have been proposed, including simple randomness. Similarly, a projected drop in murder in 2018 would not have an obvious cause. Employment of smarter technologies, expanded community intervention programs, and even colder weather could help explain year-to-year local changes.

If I had to speculate, it might be that the drugs in question in the current round of the war on drugs are simply not as lucrative, and therefore not as worth killing for, as the ones we saw in the 1990s. The real profits accrue to the people willing to take big risks to get the drugs across the border, and it could just be that the body count this time around has been shifted just outside the U.S. border. It may also be that the U.S. government at various levels has shifted toward a little more of a public health approach and a little less of a law enforcement approach. I could think positive and consider this progress, or I could be cynical and say it is partial because there is a wider range of ethnic and socioeconomic groups being affected this time around.