Crime plummeted in the U.S. in 2025 after a steady but less-precipitous decline in 2024. Not only is the scary rise in violence that began early in the COVID-19 pandemic now receding in the rearview mirror, but population-adjusted rates of some crimes — murder and burglary, notably — are approaching levels not seen in more than half a century, if ever.

Yes, the historical view on murder is less impressive when you consider the vast improvement in medical care over the decades. Burglars and perpetrators of other traditional property crimes are to some extent just being supplanted by online crooks. And it’s hard to get too excited about recent declines in shoplifting given that the deodorant is now behind lock and key at the local Walgreens. But overall, the crime drop is pretty great. If only we knew why it was happening.

I exaggerate a little. There seems to be a reasonably clear line from the social disruptions caused by the pandemic and the outrage and protests in response to George Floyd’s murder by a Minneapolis police officer in May 2020 to the subsequent rise in violent crime and the fading effects of those events probably explain much of the drop. They don’t really explain the size of last year’s decline, though.

What does? U.S. President Donald Trump’s deportation campaign was the biggest development in U.S. law enforcement in 2025 and it’s plausible that it is reducing reported crime although not necessarily for the reasons you might think. An even more important development, though, may be that the young men disproportionately responsible for crime are now too preoccupied with their phones and other electronic devices to bother.

Before I get to all that, some numbers. The semiofficial national crime statistics from the FBI won’t be out for months, but recently released compilations of local crime data from the Real-Time Crime Index and Council on Criminal Justice show that the decline in crime that started in 2022 or thereabouts (different crimes had much different trajectories) accelerated last year. In Real-Time Crime Index data from 525 U.S. jurisdictions through November, both violent crime (which rose sharply during the COVID-19 pandemic) and property crime (which didn’t) have fallen well below 2019 levels.

The Council on Criminal Justice’s more-detailed examination of crime statistics from 40 cities found that reported offenses in every category but drug offenses and sexual assault were down in 2025 relative to 2024 and all but motor vehicle theft and nonresidential burglary were down from 2019.

Much of the data show only crimes reported to police, and many crimes aren’t, but the Bureau of Justice Statistics’ annual National Crime Victimization Surveys through 2024 (the 2025 edition will be out in the fall) actually show an increase since 2019 in the percentage of violent victimizations reported to police. This crime decline is real.

The decline in murder, down 18.5% through November in the Real-Time Crime Index and 21% in 2025 in the Council on Criminal Justice data, is so big that if the FBI’s numbers show a similar drop, it will result in a murder rate of 4.1 per 100,000 people, the lowest on record.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s National Vital Statistics System maintains a homicide count based on local death records that’s more comprehensive, more reliable and goes much further back than the FBI’s. So far the CDC has released more-or-less complete data for the first half of 2025 that shows a decline of 15% compared with the same period in 2024, but given that the RTCI and CCJ data show the decline getting bigger in the second half of the year, I’ve used the RTCI’s 18.5% drop to project a 2025 CDC homicide rate of 4.9 per 100,000 people. It wouldn’t be the lowest on record but isn’t far off the lows of the 1950s.

As already mentioned, medical care for gunshot victims (more than 75% of U.S. homicides are committed with guns, according to the CDC) has improved greatly over time, although firearms have "improved,” too, and there’s debate over whether survival rates have actually risen much in recent decades. They’re definitely higher than in the 1950s, though, and as a result I suspect that gun violence is still worse now than then. Burglary probably isn’t, as economic and societal changes have rendered it increasingly less lucrative — a development I’ve addressed already and won’t go into here.

Long-term historical comparisons aside, it’s the speed of the recent drop in some violent crimes that begs for explanation, although it may not get a satisfactory one. In the Real-Time Crime Index, incidence of every violent crime fell faster as 2025 went on.

What could be causing this acceleration? Well, let’s talk about deportation. It is well established that immigrants are much less likely to be convicted of crimes than native-born Americans — and that differential has grown over the past century, meaning that today’s immigrants to the U.S. are more law-abiding than, say, President Trump’s grandparents and their peers. Illegal immigrants may be a different story and in past decades a disproportionate share of those crossing the border without authorization have been young men of limited education, a prime crime-committing demographic. My take on the limited empirical work on this topic (good data are hard to find) is that I’m not sure if illegal immigrants are more or less likely to commit nonimmigration offenses than the rest of us, but I’m pretty confident that they are not a significant driver of national crime trends one way or the other.

A deportation campaign focused on criminals might have some impact on crime rates, although the most dangerous tend to be behind bars already, and in any case, the Trump administration is now mainly detaining people with no criminal history at all. This aggressive deportation campaign could be influencing reported crime, though, by raising the costs of coming into contact with police for illegal immigrants and others with reason to suspect that their immigration status might be questioned. This may discourage them from committing crimes. It’s definitely discouraging some from reporting them. Chicago, for example, experienced a sharp drop in 911 calls during the federal government’s "Midway Blitz” immigration enforcement effort last year, with the declines steepest in neighborhoods with high immigrant populations. Another hint that reduced reporting might be a factor is that the rate of decline for aggravated assaults and rapes, crimes where the victims are usually related to or otherwise acquainted with the assailant, more than tripled during 2025.

That said, the steepest rate of decline in the RTCI data is for murder, a crime that almost never goes unreported and is seldom committed by people who spend much time weighing the pros and cons beforehand. The CCJ solicited expert opinions on what its chief executive officer, Adam Gelb, called "a historic collapse in the homicide rate” and received a range of answers, several focusing on crime-prevention programs that got a boost in funding during the Biden administration. A couple of respondents hinted at what one called "larger social movements” at work, and in a call recently, Gelb and CCJ researcher Ernesto Lopez pointed to one in particular: the decline in social activity among teenagers and young adults.

"More kids seem to be spending more time at home in their basements scrolling on their phones rather than out carousing with friends,” Gelb said. "We know that can have some terrible negative effects on mental health ... but the flip side may be that, particularly because youthful offending is often done in groups, if you’re home alone on your phone you’re less likely to go out and get into bad trouble with your friends.” The American Time Use Survey database doesn’t break out phone-scrolling in particular, but its numbers on how many hours a day men ages 15 through 24 spend socializing and playing games seem to back up this story.

An irony here is that video games have often been accused, with some justification, of encouraging violent behavior. They may also be supplanting it.

© The Japan Times