Louisville Reports First-Year Drops in Homicides, Shootings
Louisville reported a 22% decline in homicides and a 28% drop in nonfatal shootings in the first annual Safe Louisville report released by Mayor Craig Greenberg on July 7, 2026.
The city described the shooting result as Louisville’s lowest number of shootings in a decade. The report is the first annual update on Safe Louisville, the city’s violence-reduction initiative, and establishes a benchmark for measuring whether the improvement continues.
What Louisville reported
Homicides and nonfatal shooting victimizations are the two core measures identified in Louisville’s year-to-date violence table. Together, they track both the most serious outcome of violent crime and the broader number of people injured in shootings but who survived.
The first annual report records a 22% reduction in homicides during the period it examined. Nonfatal shootings declined 28%. Louisville Metro Government presented both figures as part of its update on the first year of Safe Louisville’s violence-reduction work.
The announcement states the changes as percentages rather than providing the raw homicide and shooting totals in the announcement text. It also does not specify the precise start and end dates of the reporting period there. Those details matter when officials and residents compare the results with later annual updates.
A percentage decline shows how the city’s totals changed against a comparison period, but the underlying number of incidents remains important for understanding the scale of the change. Future reports can show whether the lower totals hold over time and whether the size of the decline changes.
The recent violence context
The results come after a period in which Louisville recorded nearly 900 homicides from 2020 through 2025, according to the city’s Office of Violence Prevention. The city’s data says 91% of those homicides involved a firearm.
That recent history explains why the new figures are significant for Louisville’s public-safety planning. The report’s measures cover both fatal and nonfatal shooting violence, giving officials more than one way to track changes in the city’s violence picture.
The homicide and nonfatal-shooting figures also measure different effects. A homicide represents a death, while a nonfatal shooting victimization represents a person who was shot and survived. A decline in both categories would indicate lower totals across those separate measures, although the report does not establish that a single factor or program caused the change.
What happens next
Safe Louisville’s first annual report gives city officials and residents a starting point for evaluating the initiative’s continuing work. The reported declines are an important year-over-year change, but they are not by themselves proof of a permanent trend.
Later annual results will be needed to determine whether homicides and nonfatal shootings remain below the comparison period. They can also help show how the city’s various public-safety efforts relate to the results without assigning the change to one policing or violence-prevention program.
For now, Louisville’s first annual Safe Louisville update reports lower totals in both headline violence measures: homicides down 22%, nonfatal shootings down 28%, and the city’s shooting total at its lowest level in a decade.
Sources
- Mayor Greenberg releases first annual Safe Louisville report, Louisville Metro Government
- Year-To-Date Violence Table, Louisville Metro Government Office of Violence Prevention
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