Story Of The Year 2025? Bridgeport Murder Rate Historically Low – Three Homicides, Two More Than Greenwich

If it’s not the story of the year, it’s right up there.

Bridgeport has recorded just three murders this year, an extraordinary low point going back at least 50 years, the period I’ve chronicled the city. To compare, posh Greenwich, CT, with a population of roughly 63,000 has had one homicide, a murder-suicide involving mother and son. Suicide is not placed in the murder category.

I asked Chief Roderick Porter to go back as far as the crime statistics date to find a year the number of murders was lower. He could not find a year.

Bridgeport has come a long way since the brutal crack cocaine epidemic across the county from the mid 1980s into the 1990s turned inner-city neighborhoods into ugly gangland war zones, that also took its toll on many innocents.

During that period, under three mayoral administrations, Bridgeport experienced 50-70 murders a year.

To compare Bridgeport to like-minded Connecticut cities in 2025, year to date in New Haven, 16 murders, while 11 Hartford murders.

For the most part there’s a pattern of declining violent crime in cities.

Bridgeport’s population is now more than 150,000, according to updated Census figures. Hartford’s population about 124,000, New Haven roughly 137,000. You have to go back to circa 1975 for Bridgeport’s population eclipsing 150,000. After that time it was on a downward trend going below 140,000 for a period before rising in recent years, a portion of the increase due to Covid when many New Yorkers arrived.

Every major crime category in Bridgeport is also down, not just murders. The three murders were all domestic related with two arrests made and in the other the suspect is on the lam, according to Porter.

Some will argue that the police-involved shooting of Dyshan Best in March must be on the list. Awaiting a final determination by the state, if the shooting was justified.

“I see a trend in the city of Bridgeport where it’s really starting to thrive and there’s a lot more community involvement and community engagement and it’s really becoming a more welcoming city where people are coming,” Porter said in October.

The trend line of decreasing violent crime in large cities is chronicled by Major Cities Chiefs Associations some of it attributable to the fading COVID-era crime wave and modern law enforcement tools. Economics often impact crime scenarios. In recent years federal law enforcement has also assisted city police in taking down violent gangs.

The temperature has gone down at Bridgeport housing projects. The rival, violent drug gangs have been reduced by the feds which have rounded up a bunch of the killers. The housing projects, also, are not the high-rise fortresses of the past, where law enforcement had difficulty cracking through, if you recall the notorious Father Panik Village on the East Side that was torn down to make room for modern town-house style architecture.

Kudos to Housing Authority Director Jillian Baldwin who arrived during Covid from Colorado with HUD pressing its thumb on the scales. She pulled it out of troubled status. In addition to logistical improvements, staffing, security, cameras, grant wins, she’s done something no other housing chief implemented. Instead of the housing authority building new units on housing authority property, she has partnered with the private sector to build the modern housing.

Local walking patrols, cameras, heightened community engagement and youth programs initiated by Porter are rebuilding relationships with a citizenry suspicious of police actions, not just in Bridgeport but across the country.

Crime waves can be capricious so, hopefully, this story does not become a reporter’s curse.