Why Crime Rates Are Falling Across the U.S.

Crime rates are dropping across the U.S, in some cases reaching their lowest levels in decades. 

Data from 40 American cities shows a decrease in crime across 11 out of 13 categories of offenses last year compared to 2024, the Council on Criminal Justice (CCJ) found in a new analysis released on Thursday. Nine of those offenses, ranging from shoplifting to carjacking to aggravated assault, declined by 10% or more. 

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The homicide rate fell 21% in 35 cities which provided data for the crime, accounting for 922 fewer deaths. And the report predicted that the rate will drop even further, to four per every 100,000 residents, when the FBI releases nationwide data for jurisdictions of all sizes. That would represent the lowest homicide rate since 1900 and the largest percentage drop in homicides in any single year on record. 

President Donald Trump has taken credit for falling crime rates around the country, citing his immigration crackdown and deployment of the National Guard in cities across the U.S. since he began his second presidential term. 

Federal Bureau of Investigation Director Kash Patel highlighted the CCJ report’s findings on Thursday and credited the Administration for the decrease in overall crime. 

“Media gymnastics can’t hide the reality that this administration brought law and order back, and Americans are safer because of it,” he wrote in a post on X. He also pointed to statistics from what he called the “FBI’s historic year” that credited the agency with disrupting 1,800 gangs, seizing 2,000+ kilograms of fentanyl, and increasing violent crime arrests by 100% in 2025, among other achievements.

Data shows, however, that there has been a steady decline in crime since a spike during the COVID-19 pandemic, and that rates were already falling before Trump returned to office—including in cities the Administration has targeted in its immigration and crime crackdowns. Experts tell TIME that the drop recorded last year is part of this larger trend and can be attributed to a kaleidoscope of factors, none of which can singularly or definitively account for the decline. 

“We see very confident claims of credit in abundance, but scarce hard evidence to back them up,” CCJ president and CEO Adam Gelb tells TIME. He stresses that disaggregating all the contributing factors that act against crime to create a coherent explanation for the data is an “impossibly difficult” task. 

“The remarkable consistency in the magnitude of the decline across the country really suggests that everything’s happening at the macro level,” he added, pointing to “broader changes in society and culture and technology that are exerting enormous influence on what’s happening at the local level.”

Here’s what you should know about the recent data, and what factors experts believe could be contributing to the decline.

Last year’s decline in crime

The CCJ report found that homicide rates decreased from 2024 to 2025 in 31 out of the 35 cities evaluated, with Denver, Omaha, Nebraska, and Washington seeing declines of 40% or more. Little Rock, Arkansas, marked the biggest outlier in the broader trend, seeing a 16% increase in homicides.

In addition to the steep decline in homicides, the report found that there were 9% fewer reports of aggravated assault, 22% fewer gun assaults, 23% fewer robberies, and 2% fewer incidents of domestic violence.

Violent crime in 2025 was overall at or below its levels in 2019, before the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, according to the report. 

Cities saw 25% fewer homicides than in 2019, with the largest drop—of 36%—occurring in the cities that had the highest homicide rates before the pandemic. Robberies fell 36% in the evaluated cities from their 2019 levels, and carjackings 29%.

Beyond violent crimes, other categories of offenses also saw declines last year compared to 2024, including a 27% decrease in motor vehicle thefts, a 17% drop in residential burglaries, and a 10% decline in shoplifting. 

Drug offenses were the only category that saw an increase in 2025 from the previous year, rising 7%. But they were still down a notable 19% from 2019 levels. 

Rebounding from the pandemic

Data shows that the steady drop in crime recorded in the last three years follows a widespread spike in rates during the COVID-19 pandemic. 

“When COVID hit, and the world shut down, we basically turned off the water with respect to prevention and intervention strategies,” says Alexis Piquero, the former director of the Bureau of Justice Statistics appointed by President Joe Biden and a professor of criminology at the University of Miami. “And then it took about two or three years for the water to be turned back on. Then it starts dripping a little bit. And now ‘25 and into ‘26 the water now is at full blast.” 

John Roman, the director of the Center on Public Safety and Justice at the National Opinion Research Center of the University of Chicago, tells TIME that the loss of local government jobs as a result of the pandemic crippled communities’ abilities to prevent crime, but that local government jobs have since grown past pre-pandemic levels. 

“We actually have more local government employees now that we’ve ever had and crime is at the lowest level it’s been since 1960 and I don’t think that’s a coincidence,” he says, noting that those in such positions, like teachers, counselors, clinicians, and local police officers, are “the people who most directly work with young adults and adolescents who are at the greatest risk of committing a crime or being the victim of a crime.”

He asserts that the most influential factor in reducing crime was the allocation of federal funds that led to the proliferation of such jobs, specifically crediting the American Rescue Plan Act of 2021, a $1.9 trillion stimulus package that provided hundreds of billions in relief funds to state and local governments, among other provisions. 

“I do think that there’s a policy argument that the American Rescue Plan is probably the most important federal legislation in the years since the pandemic,” says Patrick Sharkey, a Princeton University professor of sociology who founded AmericanViolence.org, calling the measure the “strongest and most effective investment in federal funding” in his lifetime. “I think it has gone unrecognized how incredibly effective it was in stabilizing communities and stabilizing local government … It’s not very visible how important these resources are, but they play an enormous role in just making sure that communities don’t fall apart.”

These federal investments are essential for crime reduction programs at the local, neighborhood level that combat community violence, such as after-school, employment, and education programs, Piquero stresses to TIME.

Barring another pandemic-level predicament, he expects these drops in crime to continue with the continued federal support trickling down to local jurisdictions. 

“We’re much safer now than we’ve been in the last, certainly six years, and certainly since the height of the crack trade in the 1980s and in the strife and unrest of the 60s,” he adds “So I’m very I’m optimistic, but it’s also not the time to take our foot off the pedal right now.”

Shifts in technology and culture 

Outside of more trackable factors like federal funding, Gelb, CCJ’s president, believes a host of other contributors have worked together to reduce crime rates. 

Among them, he contends, is technology. 

From the growing frequency of cameras outside of homes and businesses; to more advanced criminal justice surveillance techniques and interconnected databases; to digital wallets, which have made cash robberies less common, Gelb says the increasingly technological world is causing crime to falter. 

He adds that the now ever-present role of tech is also leading to “rising youth independence,” with young people isolating themselves more rather than “carousing” with their friends. He notes that young people often co-offend in instances of violent crime.

He also attributes the falling crime rates to cultural and social influences, namely a decline in alcohol consumption and a slowing of the opioid epidemic. Increased police presence, taking guns off the streets, and local community violence intervention programs are other factors contributing to the steep drop, he says.

Trump’s role

Though Trump has taken credit for reducing overall crime in 2025, rates were already declining before he returned to office last January, and experts say it’s at best too soon to tell if his Administration has played a notable role in the drop—and that it could be outright false to attribute the change to his crackdown.

Gelb acknowledges that the increased presence of federal agents could be contributing to lower rates of crime.

But, he says, “This level of deployment and these types of tactics are unprecedented. So even if we had good research about general deterrence, it wouldn’t necessarily apply here because of the unprecedented nature of this federal deployment.”

Piquero notes that crime has also trended down in cities and areas where the National Guard has not been deployed and ICE operations have not been ramped up.

“We’re in the fourth year of a crime decline, and the National Guardian and ICE deployments have really been something that’s only happened over the last six months. It’s hard to link the two at this point,” Roman added. “It’s clear that the crime decline was fully developed before any of those deployments happened.”

Sharkey, meanwhile, believes there’s no correlation between the ramped up federal presence in cities and the decrease in crime rates at all.

“It would be ridiculous to argue that federal presence in cities played any role,” he tells TIME. “This started in 2023. So that argument is nonsensical.”