ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. (KRQE) –  Albuquerque police saw new highs and lows in homicide cases last year; while August was a record month for the number of homicides in Albuquerque, the Albuquerque Police Department (APD) solved the vast majority of those cases last year. Story continues below Community: Bill aims to encourage schools to ban phones from the classroom in NM Don't Miss: APD helicopter video shows officers chasing suspect who tried to hide in a bush Weird: Video shows Santa Fe man accused of spending the night inside a Walmart "So many of these homicides are pointless. Like [Commander] Kyle [Hartsock] said, cause you gave somebody a bad look; because you individually disrespected somebody," said Chief Harold Medina of APD, "Homicide is a societal problem, and I've always said we will continue to investigate." The year-end numbers are in from APD surrounding the Duke City's murder rate. In 2024, the city ended the year with 96 homicide victims—down from 99 in 2023, and a record 121 in 2022. "That's about a 21 percent, or 20 percent, drop from two years ago," said Gilbert Gallegos, director of communications with APD. APD solved 79 cases in 2024 and charged a record 127 suspects. There were a total of 89 new murder cases in 2024—of which, police solved 69%, or 61 cases. "I don't know if we've ever had, within the same 12-month period, that we've had such a high clearance rate," Medina said. Additionally, by solving 18 cases from previous years, the department reached an overall 89% solve rate in 2024. They credit better training through their newer 'Detective Academy;' along with better inter-department communication, and their unique civilian digital intelligence team. "They're doing that deep-level analysis and review which is freeing up the detectives' time," said Commander Kyle Hartsock of the Homicide Unit in APD. The data does show some disturbing trends: including a rise in murders of the homeless, and an increase of murder-suicide cases. "That's something I typically don't remember, in the course of my career, where we had seven homicides that were the result of a multiple homicide/suicide," Medina said. Police say domestic violence-related murders are also on the rise; and, more people are using social media apps to facilitate crimes leading to violence. "The explosion of Telegram being used to do gun deals and drug deals. It's not new that social media is being used for this, what's new is that it's on a platform that wasn't responsive to U.S. Law Enforcement orders at all," Hartsock said, "We're still hopeful that we get better cooperation from these social media companies. They are facilitating these really violent meet-ups and set-ups." August saw the most murders all year with 16 victims, following July which saw the least murders all year, with three victims. "It was funny how from our best month in a decade to our worst month historically we went to in July and August," Medina said, "I'm hoping that we can get data that kind of will point out to what occurred in August that all of a sudden it's off from the rest of the year." Albuquerque's murder rate went down 3% from 2023. APD said this is the third year in a row they've solved more than 60% of cases that happened within the same year.