America is in the midst of a historic drop in crime

(CN) — To read the news, one might believe crime is rising and maybe even worse than it’s ever been.

The president himself has done little to discourage this impression.

“Crime in American Cities started to significantly rise when they went to CASHLESS BAIL,” Donald Trump announced on his TruthSocial platform in July. “The WORST criminals are flooding our streets and endangering even our great law enforcement officers. It is a complete disaster, and must be ended, IMMEDIATELY!”

Trump has used this supposed spike in violence as a pretext to deploy the National Guard in a number of cities. Other Republicans have used it as a reason to roll back criminal justice reforms like no-cash bail.

In fact, most Americans are safer than they’ve been in decades. Crime in America is plunging — an acceleration of a trend that began in the 1990s and has mostly continued ever since, with a brief eruption of violence around the pandemic.

It’s a remarkable success story, representing thousands of lives saved and hundreds of thousands more spared from violence and trauma.

In 2023, there were around 2,500 fewer murders than in 2022, said Jeff Asher, a crime data analyst who runs a renowned blog called “Jeff-alytics."

In 2024, murders dropped by another 15%. Practically every other category of crime fell too, including rape, burglary and even car theft. The car-theft stat is particularly notable, since this category of crime had been rising for years before it plummeted by more than 20% in 2024.

Although 2025 isn’t over and crime data takes months to trickle in, all signs point to an even larger drop this year. It could even be enough to plunge the homicide rate down to its lowest level since 1960.

Data from law enforcement agencies “suggests that the murder drop should be the largest ever recorded — breaking last year’s record, which broke the year before’s record," Asher said in a phone interview.

As of June — the most recent month for which Asher has compiled data— homicides were down in nearly every major American city, including those known for violent crime like Detroit, New Orleans and Baltimore.

These cities are on track not just to have fewer murders than 2024, but to have some of the lowest levels in 50 years or more, according to data compiled by Asher.

“It’s a historic crime drop,” John Roman, director of the Center on Public Safety & Justice at the University of Chicago, said in a phone interview. And yet these stats contrast so sharply with public perception of crime that some find the figures hard to believe. Whenever Roman shares the facts with nonexperts — for example, when making conversation at a dinner party — he says, “I think everybody’s surprised."

No one knows for sure why crime is dropping so precipitously.

For that matter, no one really knows how crime got so high to begin with. Crime began rising in the 1960s and soared throughout the ‘70s and ‘80s before finally peaking in the 1990s. A lot happened in these years, making it difficult to pick apart cause and effect.

There was a baby boom, which produced lots of young people — a demographic that typically commits more crime. There was racial strife, white flight to the suburbs, a loss of faith in public institutions, the closure of mental hospitals and other reforms aimed at protecting the rights of prisoners and arrestees, to reference just a few theories.

In 1990, there were more than 2,200 murders in New York City, more than four times the number in 1960. Los Angeles likewise saw more than 1,000 killings that year.

At the time, crime had been getting worse for so long that many expected it would continue its inexorable rise. News anchors and politicians warned viewers of “superpredators.” Movies like “Robocop” predicted a not-too-distant future where criminals literally ruled the streets.

Then, without warning, crime began to fall. It kept falling nearly everywhere for the better part of three decades.

“We don’t really have good hypotheses for what we call the ‘great American crime decline,’” Roman said. Still, referencing yet another proposed explanation, he said, “I think everybody agrees that mass incarceration played a role.”

America’s prison population began to rise along with crime in the 1970s, peaking in the 2000s at more than 1.5 million. It has been inching down since but is still well above a million.

Another leading theory for the drop in crime concerns simple demographics.

“Americans are getting older, on average,” said Charles Lehman, a fellow at the conservative Manhattan Institute think tank. “We’re fatter. We’re much more surveilled. All of those things mean that the crime rate should be steadily declining.”

It’s one of the great mysteries of modern American history.

Every few years, a new thesis comes along. In “The Tipping Point,” journalist Malcolm Gladwell credited the drop in crime to new police tactics pioneered in New York while Rudy Giuliani was mayor. That’s the so-called “broken windows” theory, which posits that authorities invite violence and lawlessness when they allow minor crimes like vandalism and public intoxication to go unpunished.

In “Freakonomics,” economist Steven Levitt and journalist Stephen Dubner argued that the legalization of abortion in the 1970s led to fewer unwanted children growing up in poverty — hence fewer criminals.

Writing in Mother Jones, journalist Kevin Drumoffered the lead-crime hypothesis. Because lead paint leads to brain damage, the theory goes, a proliferation of leaded paint and gasoline in the mid-20th century might have made people impulsive and aggressive.

Lehman is skeptical of many of these popular theories.

“I tend to find those arguments not very persuasive,” he said. “They’re a little pop science-y, but it’s not a crazy opinion for a person to have.”

Nonetheless, Lehman throws a couple more theories into the pile. “Really good access to really good pharmaceuticals for mental health." Also: “People used to be paid their public benefits in cash. In the ’90s, they started getting them on debit cards.”

If experts can’t crack the 20th-century crime surge or its decadeslong reversal, it should come as no surprise that we’re also not quite sure what occurred in 2020, when the U.S. saw its biggest one-year spike in homicides dating back to at least 1960.

Of course, two pretty major events did happen that year. There was a pandemic that killed more than a million Americans, as well as national Black Lives Matter protests following the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis. With crime, the relevant factors are rarely a mystery, but sorting out the most important ones is a more difficult task.

In 2020, there were backlogs in the courts, changes to policing and disruptions to everyday routines.

“Drug markets were really disrupted during the pandemic,” Lehman noted. “When drug markets are disrupted, they become very violent.”

Regardless, in 2023, crime began to go down again.

Some experts point to changes in the safety net to explain both the rise and fall. “Local government provides all kinds of services to the people who are most at risk of both violence and victimization — particularly young men between the ages of 15 and 30,” Roman said. And yet at the start of the pandemic, more than a million of these workers lost their jobs.

“These are our teachers and counselors and coaches,” Roman added. “These are people who administer anti-violence grants.” Similarly, Asher attributes the subsequent fall in crime to investment in communities and the safety net.

The worry is that this funding could stop soon. Cities like New York and LA face multibillion dollar budget shortfalls and could soon be forced to make deep cuts to public spending.

Those cuts could be even bigger if the U.S. enters a recession. Should that happen, Asher fears we will give up tools that work.

Lehman, meanwhile, has a different concern. He says once crime drops below a certain threshold, the public might once again support ideas like reducing police budgets and prison populations.

“Every now and then, we get it into our head to be like, ‘What if we just turned off the crime-control mechanism for a little while?’ And it doesn’t go so well,” he said. “We’ve made this mistake twice now. We might make it again.”

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