Homicide in NC cities shows improvement in 2025

Homicide rates in North Carolina’s five largest cities either held steady or declined in 2025, an improvement over the negative trends in violent crime seen following the pandemic.

Starting with the state’s biggest city, Charlotte, the Queen City saw a 21% decrease in violent crime for 2025 as compared to 2024, according to statistics released last month by Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police Department. This included a 13% reduction in homicides, which dropped from 110 to 96 homicides.

In late November, following the high-profile murder of Iryna Zarutska and pressure from the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Fraternal Order of Police union, President Donald Trump’s Department of Homeland Security launched Operation Charlotte’s Web, effectively flooding the zone with agents from US Border Patrol and Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

The Zarutska case also spurred the state legislature to pass a tough-on-crime bill known as “Iryna’s Law,” which went into effect in December, that sought to close loopholes allowing violent repeat offenders to walk free.

With these efforts coming at the end of the year, however, CMPD officials said that the crime reductions were due to the internal efforts of the department.

“Day in and day out, our officers defuse conflicts, address crimes as they unfold, prevent escalations of violence and provide our investigators with the critical information needed to identify and charge offenders,” CMPD Chief Estella D. Patterson said in the Jan. 15 press release.

 “Our officers do more than respond to crime,” she added. “They take proactive steps every day to prevent it and keep our neighborhoods safe.”

The department credited increased engagement for the tangible results.

“These improvements reflect persistent, often unseen work that is driving real change,” Patterson said. “These results are not just numbers. They are the outcome of targeted strategies.”

Homicide in Other cities across the state

In addition to Charlotte’s noticeable decreases, cities like Raleigh, Durham, Greensboro, and Winston–Salem either held steady or had decreases in their homicide statistics as well.

In the state capital, second only to Charlotte in population, violent crime saw an overall reduction of 1%. While the city had a 4% increase in homicides, from 27 to 28, the overall number was still less than 30% of what Charlotte experienced in the same time span.

Per capita, Raleigh’s roughly one in 18,000 homicides was safer than Charlotte’s approximately one in 10,000. Nationwide, the 2025 per-capita homicide rate is expected to land around one in 25,000 according to initial estimates (federal crime stats compiled by the FBI do not arrive until later in the year).

Lt. David Davis, Raleigh Police Department’s chief public information officer, told the Carolina Journal in a statement that RPD took personally any incidence of violent crime.

“As Chief [Rico] Boyce often says, Raleigh Police is the community, and the community is the Raleigh Police Department,” Davis wrote. “That belief underscores how vital our community members are to everything we do and reinforces the shared responsibility we have in keeping our city safe.”

Davis said Boyce, who assumed his post as RPD chief last March, had made innovation a priority in his crime-fighting efforts.

“Technology plays a critical role in modern policing, and through our Real-Time Crime Center, we are able to identify crime trends more quickly and deploy resources where they are needed most,” he said.

The city also was expanding community engagement through ConnectRaleigh, a voluntary public video-sharing platform that currently integrates more than 1,500 cameras in a bid to “make Raleigh the safest city in the country.”

Greensboro, the state’s third-largest city, did not have its year-end statistics as readily available as other cities but did share its data via a nationwide Community Crime Map supported by LexisNexis.  

Based on those reported incidents, the Carolina Journal determined that the region saw a drop from 40 homicides in 2024 to 30 in 2025, a 25% reduction. Both years reflected a five-year downward trend with an average of around 53 homicides per year in the span between 2020 and 2025.

Per capita, however, Greensboro’s homicide rate was equivalent to that of Charlotte, roughly one in 10,000.

In Durham, the next most populous city, after having reduced its homicide rate from 18 in 2023 to six in 2024, the Bull City stayed below average with 11 reported homicides in 2025. That gave it a per-capita average of around 1 in 28,000, better than the national average.

Winston–Salem, the fifth-largest city in the state, held steady from its 2024 rates, going from 25 to 26 reported homicides in 2025, after having seen a surge of 44 homicides in 2023. But while its actual numbers were roughly equivalent to those in Raleigh, the per-capita rate painted a different picture, putting it on par with Charlotte and nearby Greensboro at just under one in 10,000 residents.

Although it doesn’t crack the top-10 cities list in terms of population, Asheville’s crime rate has made headlines in recent years, especially regarding homelessness and public drug use. But data from the Community Crime Map indicated that the western North Carolina city reported four homicides in 2025, down from 10 in 2024. That put its per-capita rate around one in 25,000, roughly equivalent to the national average.

“Homicide in NC cities shows improvement in 2025” was originally published on www.carolinajournal.com.