Homicide in the U.S. Is the Lowest Ever Measured. No One Person Gets to Take Credit.

There has never been a time in U.S. history with a lower recorded rate of homicide (or murder) than what we just experienced in 2025. That’s according to a major new analysis of crime data from 40 large U.S. cities by the Council on Criminal Justice, a nonpartisan think tank that tracked 13 specific types of major crimes in each of these locations. What they found was both a dramatic, nearly across-the-board reduction, and also a continuation of what was already happening widely across the country in every year since violent crime surged in the COVID-19 pandemic chaos of 2020-2021. The projected homicide rate of 4.0 per 100,000 residents–unconfirmed at the moment, as the FBI has not yet published its 2025 data–would be easily the lowest in recorded U.S. history, going all the way back to the beginning of data collection in 1900, surpassing previous low points in the 2010s and 1950s. This makes it fair to say that in many respects, crime in the U.S. is perhaps the lowest it’s ever been. Tell me: Does that jibe with what your Republican-dominated government has been telling you through the entirety of the second Donald Trump administration to date?

The obvious answer is “of course not.” In order to justify actions such as the surge of immigration agents into specific (Democrat-led) U.S. cities, President Donald Trump and his legion of reality deniers have chosen from the start to depict the United States as a warzone of bloodshed, a “failed nation” at the mercy of criminal gangs and leniency for killers, etc. After all, it wouldn’t make any sense for the President to be threatening the use of the Insurrection Act, or detaining random U.S. citizens without access to lawyers, in a country with record low homicide rates. In order to justify the administration’s very worst impulses and outcomes, like skyrocketing detainee deaths in custody, or eroding civil liberties that see citizens being marched out into the snow by ICE agents in their underwear, you need the illusion of chaos and lawlessness to fall back on. Thus, your GOP congressman has probably followed the Trump playbook, constantly telling you that U.S. cities in particular are more dangerous than they’ve ever been.

It’s looking likely that 2025 may have had the lowest homicide rate in OVER A CENTURY.

Perhaps since 1900.

An absolutely staggering decline, and a huge—and for now poorly-understood—policy success.

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— John Pfaff (@johnpfaff.bsky.social) Jan 22, 2026 at 10:41 AM

It is true that rates of violent crime such as homicide, burglary, carjackings, etc. climbed sharply at the dawn of the pandemic, and then held steady through about 2021. Ever since then, however, crime in the U.S. (both violent and nonviolent) has been plunging across the board, despite opposition politicians perpetually saying the opposite. And we don’t mean “plunging” back to normal, but rather falling to levels lower even than the pre-pandemic era. In 2024, on the campaign trail, denying this multi-year decrease became a core principle to Republican candidates: They all followed Trump’s lead and claimed that crime and murder were skyrocketing instead, often saying that the crime statistics were fake. Now, of course, with Republicans controlling the White House and both chambers of Congress, you’re far more likely to see the GOP trumpeting the 2025 data as real, even though the numbers come from the same source. That’s politics for you.

What’s happening with the rate of crime in the United States, however, clearly reflects a broader transformation that transcends the pettiness of politics and political parties. The decreases in 2025 homicide numbers are particularly stark, and nigh-universal: Despite cities such as Denver, Buffalo, Atlanta and Salt Lake City being about as different as cities can be, they all experienced similar sharp declines. And it wasn’t just homicide, either–of the 13 types of crime being tracked, 11 saw significant declines, including shoplifting, assault, burglary and carjacking. The only crimes that held relatively steady were drug crimes and sexual assault.

The Republican instinct in this moment should probably be to take a victory lap, although one wonders if the desire to keep brutalizing Americans necessitates the continuation of the “crime is higher than ever” narrative instead–in many cases they’d seemingly rather scare Americans into voting rather than convince them to vote by claiming that they’ve improved our lives in any way. The narrative to paint the Trump administration’s immigration policy in particular as a success, however, is right there, waiting to be seized by the GOP. They can point to the historically low homicide rate and claim that it’s because they’ve been rounding up, as DHS likes to put it, the “worst of the worst” offenders throughout 2025, despite the fact that only 7% of those detained have any prior conviction for violent crime. They can point to the ICE surges into cities such as Chicago or Washington D.C. as the reason for stark drops in the homicide rate in those cities, while simultaneously taking credit for drops in the homicide rate that happened in 2022, 2023 and 2024, during the Biden administration. It makes a huge amount of political sense for the GOP to claim credit for these numbers.

Violent crime, which has been falling sharply in the past few years since its pandemic spike, dropped even more sharply in 2025, with the homicide rate reaching a 125-year low. @shailadewan.bsky.social @lazarogamio.bsky.social www.nytimes.com/2026/01/22/u…

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— Peter Baker (@peterbakernyt.bsky.social) Jan 22, 2026 at 6:57 PM

And yet, perhaps predictably, when you look at the broader data, it becomes difficult to make any case for much of it being influenced by the specific actions of the Trump administration–or any locale initiatives, for that matter. Crime is simply going down as a societal norm in this period. It went down in cities that Trump deployed the National Guard or ICE surges to (like Chicago or D.C.), but it also went down by just as much in cities that saw no such surge, such as Omaha, Nebraska or Buffalo, New York. It doesn’t matter if your city’s mayor is a Democrat or Republican, or what their policies are: Crime likely went down by the same amount regardless, with only a tiny few exceptions. Something deeper, and distinctly apolitical seems to be at play here.

“The fact that in any individual city we are seeing crime drop across so many neighborhoods and in so many categories, means it can’t be any particular pet project in a neighborhood enacted by a mayor,” said Jens Ludwig, Director of the University of Chicago Crime Lab, to the Associated Press. “It’s not like any individual mayor is a genius in figuring this out.”

Regardless, the sustained post-pandemic decrease in violent crime has been transformational for certain cities in particular. Baltimore’s homicide rate has decreased 60% from the pre-pandemic level, hitting a record low in 2025. Smaller cities like Chattanooga and El Paso have effectively seen homicides cut in half since 2019. American cities are getting safer, and that’s an undeniably good thing for our country, socially and economically. Granted, half of the population largely chooses not to acknowledge or accept such statistics, but they’ll be safer in those places whether or not they choose to believe it. Even on that front, things might finally be turning around somewhat, as U.S. opinion on the severity of crime seems to finally be decreasing a bit as well.

This kind of across-the-board drop is exceedingly difficult to explain, and can’t simply be tacked on to some governmental initiative or law enforcement operation. Donald Trump probably should claim credit for political purposes, but considering that crime was already falling for three years before he took office in his second term, any person with the slightest interest in the data should see that this is bigger than any President.

Regardless, it will be interesting to see how Republicans approach this topic in 2026: Claim credit for a United States that is safer than ever for the average person? Or pretend that the country is more dangerous than ever to justify stripping more civil liberties away from Americans? Oh hell, why not do both simultaneously? Now that’s the Trump method.