I think OP was saying that the new phenomenon of photorealistic faces will have a different effect. So past crime rates wouldn't be an indication.

I don't think it's linked, but the US murder rate actually increased in 2016. I couldn't find European wide stats, but the UK rate has been increasing: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/20/world/europe/england-wale...

USA and UK both had increase - that's strange. UK has imigration crisis going on, that could explain part of it at least, so I checked my country (Poland), and it also had small increase in 2016 as well, but it was minimal 503->514. The downward overall trend is pretty clear. Homocides per year. Population is ~36 000 000

    1999 1121
    2000 1158
    2001 1169
    2002 1007
    2003 928
    2004 790
    2005 720
    2006 816
    2007 789
    2008 748
    2009 729
    2010 702
    2011 684
    2012 566
    2013 603
    2014 551
    2015 503
    2016 514

I would be surprised if that turned into a long-term trend. Let's hope I'm right!

I hope so too! My expectation is also that it will generally keep going down. And of course it’s still low compared to a few decades ago.

You can't just look at the overall trend because there are multiple powerful drivers of murder rates (economic stressors, chemical pollutants, etc)