Maine homicide numbers might be bucking a national downward trend.
Posted by Ed Folsom, January 23, 2026.
Earlier this month, the Maine Department of Public Safety released its annual Crime in Maine report for 2024. These reports run a year behind, so we won’t find out what happened in 2025 until about this time in 2027. The headline news on the 2024 report is that Maine’s overall crime rate continued its downward trend, dropping from 29.77 crimes per 1,000 population in 2023, to 28.82 per 1,000 population in 2024. But the trend in Maine’s homicide numbers isn’t as comforting.
Maine’s 10-year average of annual murders and non-negligent manslaughters is 26.9 for years 2015 through 2024 (calculated from annual Crime in Maine reports linked here). If the 18 victims of Robert Card’s aberrant 2013 Lewiston mass-murder were removed from the data, the 10-year average would be 25.1. The 10-year average of homicides hasn’t been that high in Maine since the bad old days of the 1990’s. The rise in the current 10-year average is attributable to the large number of homicides in the three most recently reported years, 2022-2024.
The 2025 Crime in Maine report shows the 4-year trend in violent crimes for years 2021 through 2024. It does not show the trend for homicides, in particular, over that time frame. But here are the homicide numbers:
Year Homicides
2024 33
2023 60 (42 excluding Lewiston)
2022 28
2021 19
As unusually low as the number of homicides was in 2021, the average for the most recently reported 4 years is still 35 — 23.5 for 2021-22, and 46.5 for 2023-24 (or 37.5 not counting Robert Card’s victims). This is not good. For comparison purposes, Maine’s 10-year average of homicides was 20 in 2008.
Maine still has a very low homicide rate, always among the lowest in the nation. And because the Department of Public Safety hasn’t published the homicide number for 2025 yet, we don’t know what that number was last year.
But nationally, as reported by Axios yesterday, “Murders fell 21% last year in 35 large U.S. cities — the biggest one-year drop ever and likely the lowest rate since 1900.”
It looks like Maine might be bucking the national homicide trend by trending up, not down.
