Two years after a record number of homicides in Newport News, the city has tallied its lowest number in more than 12 years.
The city finished 2025 with 18 unjustified homicides, according to numbers released Monday by the Newport News Police Department. That’s a 22% reduction from 2024 — and a 62% drop from the 47 in 2023 that’s believed to be a city record.
In fact, the 18 homicides for the year rank as Newport News’ lowest annual total since 2013.
Moreover, non-fatal shootings in the city are down significantly, coming in at 48 for the year — the lowest in Newport News since at least 2008.
Those shootings are 17% lower than 2024 and a 52% reduction from the 103 such shootings seen three years earlier.
“These numbers reflect a decline for a reason,” Newport News Mayor Phillip Jones said at a news conference at police headquarters Monday. “We continue to prioritize public safety here in Newport News.”
The city’s plummeting homicide counts are in line with larger trends — both nationally and in other Hampton Roads cities.
ABC News reported last week that when the numbers come in, 2025 is expected to end the year with a roughly 20% reduction in homicides. That would rank as the largest one-year drop in homicides ever recorded.
National experts said that homicides spiked heavily across the country between 2020 and 2022 with the effects of the pandemic. But now they are back down to more normal levels and even lower than that in many cases.
Police investigators and officials outside a home where a woman was found dead on Saturday afternoon, March 29, 2025. (Peter Dujardin/Daily Press)
Mayor Jones said he had a phone call Monday with various mayors. In the call, he said, Baltimore’s mayor noted that people in his city were attributing the local homicide reduction to the larger national trends rather than crediting the city itself.
“In 2023, when we were up, people weren’t saying it was national trends,” Jones said. “They were saying that Baltimore or Newport News were dangerous.”
Jones asserted that while there are clearly positive national trends at work, local community and city leaders have also stepped up to make it happen.
“We have put the resources into place,” Jones said. “We may be riding some sort of wave, but I would say it’s a leadership wave. I would say it’s a partnership wave. And I would say that citizens of Newport News expect and deserve to feel safe, and these numbers reflect that.”
The Newport News City Council, he said, has devoted money to the police department to fight crime — with both manpower and technology. The council has also invested in crime prevention efforts aimed at the city’s youth.
“This is more than just a national story,” Jones said. “This is local boots on the ground.”
Police Chief Steve Drew, standing near Jones at the podium, said his department is getting the backing it needs.
“Our city and elected officials have done an outstanding job in supporting us,” Drew said. “I get calls from the mayor, the mayor’s office, city management, ‘What do you need?’”
Drew said he couldn’t attribute the plummeting gun violence to one specific thing. “It’s like pieces of a puzzle and it all fits together,” he said.
“It’s staffing, it’s technology, it’s working smarter, it’s putting people in the right places” using predictive tools, he said. “It’s partnering with our schools. What happens in the schools might carry over to a neighborhood. What happens in our neighborhood carries over to the schools.”
Flock Safety cameras and other technologies, he said, have helped solve cases.
Newport News Police Chief Steve Drew addresses those attending Wednesday, July 24, 2024, morning’s mid-year report on gun violence in Newport News. (Stephen M. Katz / The Virginian-Pilot)
Drew said that one “red flag” in the otherwise good numbers is that many teenagers have suffered gunshot wounds in 2025, to include horseplay and accidental shootings. Ten of those cases, he said, have been criminal shootings, up from 2024.
“That is one of the things that we want to double down on this year,” Drew said.
But at a time when many law enforcement agencies are having issues with vacancies and recruiting, Drew said that’s a non-issue for him.
“I will tell you, I am very blessed,” Drew said. “This city is very blessed with the staffing levels that this police department.”
Assistant Newport News Police Chief Mike Grinstead — who oversees recruiting and filling the ranks — said after the news conference that the department has fewer than 20 vacancies. The department is rated to have more than 400 sworn officers.
Though the 2025 homicide numbers are good, Drew noted that all 18 slayings seen in 2025 “represent people, communities and neighborhoods.”
“I won’t ever forget those that are still suffering,” Drew said. While most of the cases have been cleared, six cases remain open.
According to police department numbers, Newport News has tallied 286 homicides between 2016 and 2025, or an average of about 29 annually.
The city had 844 non-fatal shootings during that same stretch, or about 84 a year, with the counts in 2016 and 2022 surpassing 100.
But Assistant Chief Brandon Creswell said after the news conference Newport News’ 48 non-fatal shootings in 2025 were the lowest since at least 2008. He couldn’t go back beyond that to find the lowest year on record without more in-depth research, he said.
Newport News actually had 19 homicides for the year, but one of them — the Aug. 16 killing of Marquize Donte Ross on Poplar Avenue — was removed from the list after it was ruled a justified act of self-defense. Under FBI and State Police crime reporting rules, only unjustified killings are counted.
Of the 18 slayings, 14 were by gunshots.
Seven of the slayings — or 38% of the total — were domestic-related, Drew said. Several others were due to arguments between people who know each other, two were “drug related,” and one was a killing during a robbery.
Police said that of Newport News’ 18 killings in 2025, 12 of them — or 67 percent — are considered solved. Eleven have been cleared by arrest and another by the death of a man deemed responsible for the slaying.
“We’re close on two or three that will be presented to the commonwealth’s attorney’s office here in the next month,” Drew said.
Jones, for his part, said the plan going forward is “to continue to invest in the women and men of the police department,” including increasing compensation for public safety. The goal, he said, is to try to get to no homicides in the city.
“It’s continuing to strengthen the team, continuing to invest in them, and you’ll see historic numbers like this continue to go down,” he said.
Peter Dujardin, 757-897-2062, pdujardin@dailypress.com
https://www.pilotonline.com/2026/01/05/newport-news-tallies-lowest-number-of-killings-in-12-years/
