Birmingham, Alabama, is on pace to close 2026 with its fewest homicides in roughly 75 years — a turnaround for a majority-Black city that for decades made national headlines for its murder rate.
Birmingham police counted 34 homicides through Oct. 1, down from 61 at the same point in 2025 and 129 at the same point in 2024, Police Chief Michael Pickett said at the department’s third-quarter briefing. The city’s lowest annual total on record is 44, set in 1951. Just two years ago, Birmingham recorded 152 homicides, its deadliest year.
“I did not think that we would have this much of a reduction but of course that’s always the goal,” Pickett said. He put the drop at 74% compared with 2024 and said the department has cleared 91% of this year’s cases.
“Birmingham is on track for our fewest homicides in 75 years,” Mayor Randall Woodfin wrote on Facebook this month, crediting the officers of the Birmingham Police Department, Pickett, and the city’s community violence intervention workers.
The city’s bet runs on two tracks. On the policing side, Pickett has pointed to the department’s crime reduction plan, enforcement targeting illegal firearms, and cooperation with federal agencies. On the community side, Birmingham has put about $5.4 million in American Rescue Plan money into violence intervention programs: a hospital-based partnership with UAB Hospital, the Jefferson County Department of Health, the Offender Alumni Association, and Violence Intervention and Prevention Partners that places specialists at the bedsides of people wounded by gunfire; a street outreach team run with the Urban League of Alabama; a Group Violence Reduction Strategy with the National Institute for Criminal Justice Reform; and One Hood. With the one-time federal dollars expiring, the city council extended the hospital-linked program through June 2027 with $1.15 million and put $3 million for community violence intervention — a $1.5 million increase — into the city’s fiscal 2027 budget. Whether every program is fully covered once the federal money runs out remains unclear.
The honest caveats: murders are falling across the country, too — crime analyst Jeff Asher projects the lowest U.S. murder rate ever recorded in 2026, after the FBI reported the national homicide rate hit a 75-year low in 2025 — and nobody can prove which piece of Birmingham’s approach drove the drop. One category is moving the wrong way: domestic violence offenses are up 18.3% this year, the chief said. “This is not something the police department can handle alone,” Pickett said of the domestic violence increase.
Two accounting notes readers deserve: the mayor’s latest post says homicides are down 46% from last year, while the police department’s own Oct. 1 numbers work out to about 44% — and a May fact-check by ABC 33/40 found an earlier Woodfin figure slightly overstated. Separately, Bhamwiki counts 38 homicides as of Oct. 1 because it includes police-involved and justified cases; the police count is 34. And the pace math matters: 34 homicides through Oct. 1 projects to roughly 45 for the full year — just above the 1951 record of 44. So “fewest since 1951” is within reach; a new all-time low likely isn’t.
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Drafted by News Observed Editorial AI, human reviewed and published.
Based on reporting by Bakersfield News Observer.
