TOLEDO, Ohio — Homicides in Toledo fell nearly 27 percent over the first nine months of 2026, but the number of people shot rose almost 19 percent, city leaders said as they released third-quarter crime statistics on Monday, Nov. 2, according to reporting by 13abc (WTVG) summarized by the Fostoria Free Press and the Lake Erie Inquiry.
Mayor Wade Kapszukiewicz and Police Chief Kevin Braun presented the numbers together, the Free Press reported. It was Braun’s first crime-statistics update as chief: he officially took over the Toledo Police Department on Nov. 1, after Chief Mike Troendle retired over the weekend, 13abc reported via the Free Press.
Comparing January through September 2026 with the same period in 2025, the city reported 22 homicides, down from 30 — a decline of 26.7 percent, both the Free Press and the Lake Erie Inquiry reported from the city’s figures. Over the same period, the number of people shot, not counting self-inflicted injuries, rose to 134 from 113, an increase of 18.6 percent, the same reports said.
The two trends point in opposite directions, and city leaders presented both rather than only the improvement. Fewer killings alongside more shootings can reflect several factors, including how many shooting victims survive, and the city’s release did not attribute the divergence to a single cause in the reports summarized by the Free Press and the Inquiry.
Barring a very tragic final stretch of the year, the mayor said Toledo was on course to end 2026 with its lowest homicide total in over a decade, the Lake Erie Inquiry reported from the news conference. The year-end figures are expected in late January or early February, the Inquiry reported.
For Toledo residents, the practical takeaway is mixed: the city’s most serious crime measure is improving at a pace city leaders call historic, while gun violence that wounds rather than kills is rising. The next quarterly release, and the year-end totals due early in 2027, will show whether the homicide decline held through the final months of 2026.
Braun’s swearing-in and the year-end release schedule give the department a clear public timeline: the new chief owns the next report, due in the first weeks of 2027, and residents will be able to judge the full-year trend — homicides, shootings and the other measures the city tracks — against the nine-month picture presented on Nov. 2.
Photo: MrJacon000, CC BY-SA 4.0 — Wikimedia Commons