Crime in Hartford is down almost all the way across the board so far this year, with the mayor attributing the dramatic drops to a proactive approach that looks to identify those most likely to engage in violent offenses.
“I think we’ve shown that police working together with community groups and community members really can drive down crime,” said Hartford Mayor Arunan Arulampalam, who took office in January 2024. “We’ve gotten a lot smarter on crime. We are targeting the sources of crime, under places that are most likely to be sources of crime and working closely with community groups to drive down violence.
“Our shooting numbers are the lowest that we’ve seen on record,” he added. “And that’s transferred into homicide rates as well. But it’s also auto theft, larceny. Working together, we’re able to show, I think, that communities can make themselves much safer and provide a level of safety and comfort that residents deserve.”
According to the most recent Compstat report released by the Hartford Police Department, which includes crime statistics through July 26, each category that is tracked in the report saw a drop between the first seven months or so of 2025 compared to last year, with the one exception being the number of shooting victims, which rose from 38 to 40, representing a 5% increase. Compared to the same time period in 2023, when 56 people in the city had been shot, this year has seen a 29% drop.
The number of homicides so far this year, six, represents a 40% drop compared to the same time period in 2024 when 10 people had been killed, the stats show. This represents an even more dramatic decrease of about 73% when comparing the 22 people who had been murdered in 2023 through the first seven months.
Aggravated assaults so far this year are down 5% compared to 2024, falling from 176 to 167. Aggravated assaults involving a firearm are down 25%, dropping from 55 last year to 41 so far this year, according to the Compstat report.
The number of sexual assaults reported in the city so far this year dropped to 28 from 32 in 2024, marking a 13% drop, the stats show.
Robberies are down from 83 in 2024 to 64, a 23% decline. Robberies involving a firearm fell from 44 in the first seven months of 2024 to 40 in 2025, representing a 9% decline, according to the report.
Property crime is also down across the board, with the biggest drop being seen in auto thefts, which fell from 690 at this point last year to 450 so far in 2025, a 35% drop, the stats show. General larcenies fell from 1,416 in 2024 to 1,059 in 2025, a 25% decline. Burglaries dropped by 1% with 150 reported in 2025 compared to 152 at the same point last year.
Mike Lawlor, who works as an associate professor in the University of New Haven’s Criminal Justice Department, said the drop Hartford is seeing is mirroring a trend that the entire state and nation as a whole is experiencing.
Ronnell Higgins, commissioner of the Connecticut Department of Emergency Services and Public Protection, told reporters this week at a news conference at the FBI’s New Haven Field Office that the state saw nearly a 10% drop in crimes against persons — which includes homicide, sexual assault, robbery, kidnapping and other serious offenses — during the first quarter of the year compared to the same time period in 2024. Higgins said it represented the lowest those types of crimes have been since 2021.
The news conference was held to announce that federal, state and local authorities conducted “Operation No Escape,” working to apprehend 84 people with warrants out for their arrest who were wanted for “egregious” offenses involving violence, according to P.J. O’Brien, special agent in charge of the FBI’s Connecticut district. O’Brien said the operation fell under a larger nationwide effort known as “Summer Heat” and represented the FBI’s renewed effort to drive down violent crime.
FBI leads ‘Operation No Escape’ to round up 80+ people wanted in CT for ‘violent, egregious’ crimes
According to Lawlor, crime had been “pretty steadily” declining around the nation until 2019. After that, the COVID-19 pandemic brought with it a spike in crime, which has since been declining and inching closer to what it had been before the pandemic.
While efforts like “Operation No Escape” can help reduce crime, Lawlor said initiatives like that tend to represent a “drop in the bucket” compared to the approaches referenced by Arulampalam.
“One of the many reasons things were going well before COVID is because police departments and others had developed these strategies to prevent things before they happened, like firearm intervention, project longevity and project safe neighborhoods and all these other initiatives where police work together with community people to try and identify when there’s a problem percolating and diffuse it ahead of time,” Lawlor said. “All those things proved to be pretty effective.”
One concern Lawlor said he has with crime going forward is the impact that the number of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement raids could potentially have. He said the situation has the potential to break down trust between immigrants and law enforcement.
An even bigger concern, he said, are the cuts made by the federal government under President Donald Trump’s administration, as federal funding makes many intervention programs possible.
“A lot of the federal funding for these initiatives has been either eliminated or significantly cut,” Lawlor said.
Arulampalam attributed Hartford’s success in driving down crime to a combination of the work done by the Office of Violence Prevention — which was formed last year — and the federal funding that makes community-based violence prevention initiatives possible.
“In the last year of the Biden administration, we got $5.6 million dollars across nonprofits from the federal government to fund community-based violence intervention programs,” Arulampalam said. “We built a real ecosystem in which those who’d been victims of violence, who we know are most likely to become the next perpetrators of violent incidents or next victims, get the services they need from the moment they get to the hospital. That has allowed us to really target group and gang violence in the city.
“Last summer, in the entire summer, we had only one incident of group or gang violence,” Arulampalam added.
When Arulampalam was campaigning in 2023, the biggest concern he heard from parents was the safety of their children doing something as simple as walking to school, he said. Seeing crime drop so drastically so far this year has been encouraging for him to see as children return to school.
“The coordination within our schools and the police department is really focused on youth violence, and I think has helped make this a much safer summer and hopefully a much safer beginning to school,” Arulampalam said.
“At the national level, we keep hearing about how there’s chaos and violence in our cities, but I think what we’ve seen is how Democratic mayors working closely with communities and police departments in cities all over the country — and Hartford is, I think, one of the national examples of this — are able to have significant impact on rates of violence in cities,” Arulampalam said. “If the White House or anyone else wants to find out what it takes to actually make a community safer, they should come visit Hartford and we’re happy to share with them our successes and why we’re seeing this level of success.”
