BATON ROUGE - As 2024 comes to a close, the number of homicides within the city of Baton Rouge is down from last year.

With two weeks left to go, Baton Rouge Police report 80 homicides, down from 2023's 81. 

On Friday, at a press conference announcing arrests made in the shooting death of eight-year-old Diellon Daniels, Chief TJ Morse credited police officers and the community's help for the downward trend. 

"The facts show we are actually experiencing a downward trend of violent crime inside the city limits of Baton Rouge. The parish numbers might be up, but inside the city limits of Baton Rouge, all violent crime is down. Our homicide numbers are lower than they were last year," Morse said.

In the same presser, Morse poked at the media's reporting during the first three months of 2024, which were the deadliest in the city in the last 25 years. 

"As you can remember, we had a spike at the end of last year and the beginning of this year where everybody in this room, all these news agencies, were reporting that we are gonna have the highest number of homicides we've ever had and that we were projected to be 90 percent higher than we were last year. We are under than what we were last year."

The following weekend, a person was killed and five others injured in shootings across the city. 

The first happened Friday around 10 pm on Choctaw near N. 38th. Police say three victims sitting in three separate cars were shot. It's unclear whether the victims knew each other.

Saturday afternoon during the Gus Young Christmas parade, 41-year-old Derwin James was shot to death and his 10-year-old son was caught in the crossfire. The child is expected to be okay.

Then Saturday evening, at a different Christmas parade downtown,  one person was shot and another was hit by an ATV fleeing the scene.

While homicides within city limits are down, across the entire parish they are up 106 from last year's 102. 

Here are the last four years of data for the city and entire parish:

PARISH-WIDE HOMICIDE NUMBERS

2020 -- 118

2021 -- 149

2022 -- 114

2023 -- 102

2024 -- 106

CITY HOMICIDE NUMBERS 

2020 -- 101

2021 -- 120

2022 -- 95

2023 -- 81

2024 -- 80

Both of these sets of numbers do not include justified or negligent homicides.