Crime: Why murder rates are plummeting

"If rates continue to fall this year, then 2025 could see the lowest murder rate ever recorded in the U.S."

(Image credit: Catherine McQueen / Getty Images)

published 16 June 2025

You may not know it from all the crime-filled tabloid headlines, but murder rates are in free fall across the U.S., said Sophie Clark in Newsweek. So far this year, homicides in big cities are down 20% over the same period in 2024, with murders dropping by a whopping 55% in Denver, 24% in St. Louis and Baltimore, and 25% in New Orleans, according to data from independent analyst Jeff Asher. "If rates continue to fall this year, then 2025 could see the lowest murder rate ever recorded in the U.S." It's a remarkable turnaround from the bloodiest days of the pandemic: Murders spiked 30% in cities in 2020—the biggest single-year jump since 1960—and stayed high for the next two years. The Trump administration is claiming its tough-on-crime policies are responsible for the recent drop. But urban murder rates actually began their steady decline under President Biden, falling 13% year over year in 2023 and then 20% in 2024. The big question is why.

Thank big-city leaders for "using the criminal justice system again," said Charles Fain Lehman in The Free Press. The anti-cop backlash that followed George Floyd's murder in 2020 led to a fall in law enforcement activity, morale, and staffing in big cities. "Unsurprisingly, murder soared." That led to another backlash, with voters booting "soft-on-crime prosecutors" and electing mayors who campaigned on public safety. Meanwhile, diminished police departments focused their resources "on the small number of criminals—mostly young, gang-involved men—who drive most of the offending." Such tactics won't "win plaudits among" the "Defund the Police" crowd, but they work. Other factors likely contributed to the drop in murders, said Jeff Asher in his Substack newsletter, including the massive post-Covid surge in public and private investment in jobs, infrastructure, and social services. Murders may have fallen simply because "we spent a lot of money everywhere on stuff."

Our cities may be getting safer, said David Wallace-Wells in The New York Times, but "most of us haven't clocked the improvements." A Gallup poll last year found that 64% of voters, including 90% of Republicans, thought crime was getting worse. Perhaps that's because "the stories we tell ourselves have changed," away from "the concrete risks of direct violence and toward more ambient impressions of decay and decline" spread on Fox News and social media. "For me, it's a distressing possibility that law-and-order vibes could be more important to my neighbors than actual rates of murder or rape."