Granite State Times

While violent crime is surging across the country, statistics show that violent crime in New Hampshire has been declining for the past six years and remains far below the national average.

The state’s murder rate is at its lowest since 2009, with a rate of 0.9 murders per 100,000, according to the Federal Bureau of Investigation's (FBI) Crime Data Explorer. Since the FBI began tracking murders in the 1960s, the U.S. has recently recorded the largest increase in homicides in modern history, a 30% jump.

"It is the largest increase in 100 years," Robert Anderson, chief of the mortality statistics branch at National Center for Health Statistics, told CNN.

FBI crime reports show that 21,570 Americans were killed in 2020, as compared to 16,425 in 2019, according to MSN.

MSN reported that the murder rate in the U.S. was six homicides per 100,000 people in 2019, and it jumped to 7.8 per 100,000 in 2020, accounting for the biggest increase since 1995, yet still below the 10 homicides per 100,000 seen in the 1980s.

“The rise in crime we’ve seen since the George Floyd death and the riots over the summer is astounding,” Heather MacDonald, a scholar at the Manhattan Institute, said in an interview with Inez Stepman on her YouTube program, "High Noon." “Last year we saw the largest percentage increase in homicides in this nation’s history, and it’s gotten worse in 2021.

Through the middle of this year, police retirements were up by 45% and resignations also rose 18%, according to MacDonald, who told Fox News that it could be attributed to the added scrutiny of law enforcement amid calls to “defund the police.”

The National Fraternal Order of the Police reported that 75 police officers have been involved in ambush-style attacks, along with 241 officers shot and 44 killed so far this year.

However, violent crime in New Hampshire is on the decline, and the incidents per 100,000 remain well below the national average. In 2020, the violent crime rate was 146.4 incidents per 100,000 people, while the national rate was 398.5 incidents per 100,000 people. The murder rate in New Hampshire is at its lowest rate since 2009, with a rate of 0.9 murders per 100,000, according to the FBI's Crime Data Explorer.