DETROIT — 2014 statistics released by the FBI show that Detroit might no longer be qualified as “murder capital”, a term coined for the Motor City in recent years for having the most homicides crimes in a city with 100,000 residents or more.

According to the statistics, released last week, Detroit has had fewer homicides, rapes and robberies in 2014 than the previous year. Each year the FBI’s Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR) program collects monthly counts of crimes from thousands of law enforcement agencies to produce the data.

Detroit’s murder rate dropped from 316 in 2013 to 298 in 2014. Only Chicago and New York have had more murders, but the populations of those cities are at least 12 times greater than Detroit.

Detroit still is one of the worst in terms of murder per capita, sitting at 44 homicides per 100,000 residents. Only St. Louis has more, with 49.9 murders per 100,000 residents.

The rest of the top five includes New Orleans, with 38 murders per 100,000; Jackson, Mississippi, with 35 per 100,000 and Baltimore with 34 murders per 100,000 residents.

In Detroit, overall crime appears to be down, despite a 10 percent decrease in the number of police officers in the city in 2014. According to the FBI, there were 13,616 violent crimes— murder, rape, assault and robbery— compared with 14,504 in 2013, a 6.5 percent drop.

Many attribute the decrease in crime to Detroit Police Chief James Craig, who came into the department a few years ago with a task force to aggressively tackle crime and drug rings. During Craig’s tenure, crime in the city has steadily been on the decline.

“It’s no secret that in 2014 we lowered violent crime,” Craig told the Detroit News. “And we had the lowest number of criminal homicides in 40 years. We’re not waving the flag of success, but we are waving the flag of progress.”

According to Craig, the trend is expected to continue for 2015. So far this year, overall crime is down 11 percent when comparing October 2014 to October 2015.

He attributed recent drops in crime to a focus on data, which increases accountability of commanders by requiring precinct captains to appear at weekly meetings to explain crime trends in their areas and what they’re doing to address them.

Of course, contributing to the city’s murder rate decline is the city’s continued population loss. It is estimated that less than 700,000 people live within the city. A far cry from its heyday in the 1950s, when it was booming with more than 1.8 million residents.

The poverty rate and income levels, which are among the worst in the country, are also factors contributing to the number of murders committed in the city. A typical Detroit household made $25,769 in 2014, second lowest in the country and less than half of what the typical American household made. Similarly, its poverty rate of 39.3 percent was the second highest in the county, well more than double the national poverty rate of 15.5 percent.

On September 28-30, the U.S. Department of Justice hosted a Violence Reduction Network Summit at the Renaissance Center in downtown Detroit as part of its initiative to reach out to communities with crime rates higher than the national average.

The justice department had also included Flint, Chicago, Little Rock and Compton among other cities in the network, which aims to determine what type of federal assistance they can receive.

So far, Detroit Police have received about $10 million in federal grants to help with everything from the backlog of sex assault kits, to hiring more officers to outfitting the department with body cameras.

The Detroit Police Department is also boasting about the decline in crime reports in the Detroit Public Schools System.

In a news release, DPS said district police filed 711 reports in 2014-15, down from 1,003 in 2013-14.

Larceny reports fell 56 percent, from 153 to 67; armed robberies fell 74 percent, from 27 to 7; indecent exposure complaints fell 85 percent, from 20 to three, and felony assaults were down 14 percent, from 49 to 42.

During the 2014-15 school year, police worked to improve the environment in school buildings, including initiatives that included staff trainings and crime stopper programs involving students.