After a substantial decrease in homicides after the 2005 "year of the gun" and a stable period 2009–2015, the murder rate in Toronto started to increase again drastically in 2016. The homicide rate jumped to 75 homicides in 2016 and spiked in 2018 with 96 homicides in 2018, which is partially due to the Toronto van attack, which resulted in the murder of 10 people on April 23. This increased Toronto's homicide rate to 3.5 per 100,000 people in 2018, the highest among major Canadian cities and higher than New York City for the same year. The homicide total dropped again in 2019 to 78 (a rate of 2.7 per 100,000 people) below the rate of most US cities, but still higher than the Canadian average of 1.8.