Violent crime in the city of Rochester continued a decline in 2024, returning to numbers comparable to the pre-pandemic era.
By year’s end, there were 45 homicides in the city of Rochester. That’s 10 less than 2023, and 35 less than in 2021, when the country was riding out the pandemic and a spike in violent crime, according to data from the Rochester Police Department.
Just over 200 people were shot in the city in 2024, less than half the 419 people shot in 2021. For comparison, the city had 31 homicides in 2019 and 172 people were shot.
Rochester’s 2020-2021 crime spike mirrored trends in cities across the country. But since then, most categories of crime have trended downward.
The most current figures, released Dec. 18, show that in the city of Rochester, robberies, burglaries, and larcenies were at their lowest point in the past five years. Two crime categories remained high: aggravated assault and motor vehicle theft.
Motor vehicle theft skyrocketed in 2023, largely due to an easily exploited security flaw in KIAs and Hyundais, which was fueled by the KIA Boyz social media trend. That caused auto thefts to more than triple to nearly 4,000 from 2022 to 2023.
In 2024, the reported number of stolen cars declined significantly to just over 2,000, though that figure is still significantly higher than pre-2023 numbers.
