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Why violent crime is dropping in US cities

Violent crime fell dramatically in 2025, in what experts expect to be the year with the sharpest drop in homicides in recorded history.

The decline, detailed in two recent reports of major U.S. cities, follows a trend that began in 2022, after the COVID-19 pandemic saw a record-breaking spike in homicides.

“This is the fourth year in a row of declines, and each year has gotten a little bigger than the year before. And this is the first time that we’ve seen it in all of the categories, I think seven of the eight categories fell by close to a record amount,” John Roman, director of the Center on Public Safety and Justice at NORC at the University of Chicago, said in an interview Monday, referring to the eight major crime categories that the FBI tracks. 

“So this is a unique and historic decline in crime and violence in the U.S.,” he continued. 

The FBI has not yet published its official crime statistics for 2025, but the findings are expected to align with recent reports from the Major Cities Chiefs Association’s (MCCA) violent crime survey, released earlier this month, and the Council on Criminal Justice’s (CCJ) year-end crime update, released late January.

The MCCA survey, including data from 67 of 68 responding agencies, shows from 2024 to 2025, homicide is down 19.3 percent, rape is down 8.8 percent, robbery is down 19.8 percent, and aggravated assault is down 9.7 percent.

The CCJ report — which includes data from 40 large American cities, though not every city reports data for every crime — shows from 2024 to 2025, homicides dropped by 21 percent, robbery decreased by 23 percent, and aggravated assault declined by 9 percent. 

CCJ tracks rape and other forms of sexual assault in the same category, which did not report any significant change in 2025 from the previous year.

It’s difficult to pinpoint a single reason for the decline in crime over the past few years, but members of the Trump administration often tout President Trump’s aggressive approach to crime and immigration. His supporters also point to his tough rhetoric as a deterrent to would-be criminals.

FBI Director Kash Patel responded to coverage last month of the 2025 CCJ report, suggesting Trump and “the historic results of this FBI” deserve credit for the historic drop in homicides.

“Nearly 200% more arrests.  Violent gangs crushed. Fugitives hunted down,” Patel wrote in a post on the social platform X in late January. “Media gymnastics can’t hide the reality that this administration brought law and order back, and Americans are safer because of it.”

Many experts, however, say the primary driver of plummeting crime rates is the sharp increase in crime in 2020 and 2021. 

“The number one reason why crime is falling now is because it was sort of artificially high because of covid. Covid had all kinds of consequences that led to there being more violence,” Roman said. 

He also suggested that funding for states and local governments from the American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA) helped communities recover from steep losses in the pandemic — including by funding teachers roles, counselors and more police officers in communities. 

While specific programs in local communities might have been effective at reducing crime, Roman noted that the drop in crime is a national trend that must have a broader explanation.

“If you look at the top 25 biggest cities in the U.S., all but maybe one or two have seen big declines, and the ARPA money went everywhere. It didn’t go to specific programs. It wasn’t like, if you have this specific program, you get the money, and if you don’t have it, you don’t. Everybody got the money,” he said. “And that’s really the key clue to why it probably is those funds that explain the decline.”

Roman said the ARPA funding is the only explanation in recent years “that was universal.”

“Every other explanation that I hear is specific to one place or one program and doesn’t explain why crime and violence is declining massively everywhere,” he said.

Some point to the investments in community violence intervention programs as successful, but others say it’s difficult to prove the effectiveness of those programs and the evidence has been mixed in their results.

Emily Owens, a professor of criminology and economics at the University of California, Irvine, agreed that the national trend suggests a larger reason. 

“The consistency of the homicide decline, both across cities and over time, makes me inclined to think this has to do with larger social movements, temporarily disrupted by COVID-19 when the world turned upside down, than with any one particular thing one particular city might be doing,” Owens said in an analysis of the data.

White House spokesperson Abigail Jackson pushed back on suggestions that ARPA funding contributed to crime drop. The legislation, which included $350 billion for state and local governments, was signed by President Biden in 2021. 

“This is a claim so absurd that it would make even the most partisan Democrat flak blush. Joe Biden’s soft-on-crime policies made communities less safe,” Jackson said. 

“President Trump has secured the border, deported violent criminal illegals, and empowered law enforcement to do their jobs. Crime is dropping because of President Trump’s law and order policies. Any suggestion otherwise is simply not based in reality,” she continued.

Copyright 2026 Nexstar Media Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.

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