Nobody Really Knows Why the Murder Rate Is Plummeting |
Amid the daily horrors of President Trump’s second term, it can be easy to overlook an unambiguous piece of excellent news: Many fewer Americans are killing each other. After a major spike in the murder rate that coincided with the beginning of the pandemic and lasted well into the 2020s, the last two years have seen a remarkable reversal, with killings and shootings dropping to levels not seen in decades, possibly over a century. The decline is evident in New York City, where 2025 saw the fewest shootings and shooting victims in the city’s recorded history. But the trend is happening across the country in cities big and small, including those that have struggled mightily with gun violence in recent years like Chicago (which in 2025 saw the lowest numbers of murders in 60 years).
And though there is no shortage of theories as to why this is happening — and no shortage of politicians to claim credit — actual evidence is hard to come by. So what is going on? I spoke with Jeff Asher, a crime-data analyst who frequently writes about the subject and runs the firm AH Datalytics, which powers the Real Time Crime Index, a database that uses statistics from police departments around the country to extrapolate national trends. We discussed his theories as to why violence and other forms of social disorder are on the wane — at least for now.
It seems like there’s no real consensus on the $64,000 question here: Why is the murder rate going down so sharply?
It’s not a $64,000 question — it’s a $64 billion one. It’s an enormous question we don’t have the answer to. I tend to think that the more confident someone is in saying it’s this or it’s that, the less I tend to believe them. We don’t know why it fell in the ’90s. We don’t know why it was sort of level in much of the 2000s.
Yeah, I was going to say, there’s no agreement about previous drops, so how could there be consensus about this one?
Exactly. With that caveat, I would say that the thing that resonates strongest with me is that this has all been national in scope. It went up everywhere, and it’s going down pretty much everywhere. It’s happening in an environment where we didn’t see dramatic increases in policing, and we didn’t see huge increases in clearance rates — they plunged in 2020 and 2021 and have recovered since then, but that largely reflects the fact that we’ve just got fewer crimes, which usually means higher clearance rates. So there hasn’t been some massive improvement from law enforcement. A lot of times activists will talk about the root causes of crime — how you’ve got to fix poverty, you’ve got to fix education. We didn’t fix any of that. And the country is still awash in guns.
The trend started in 2023, so the “why” probably has its roots in things that happened in 2021 and 2022, because these things don’t usually change suddenly. So what are the explanations that........