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In Memphis, Tennessee, violent crime is down 40% from a year ago. In April, Baltimore logged four homicides, the lowest monthly total since 1970. In New Orleans, violent crime is down 70% from 2022, when the city had the highest murder rate in the country. Similar trends are occurring in Indianapolis, New York City, across California and other locations around the United States.
Figures like these can be misleading. Pick the right crime, the right starting point, and the right locations, and it’s possible to tell almost any story about crime you want — a trap we’ve cautioned readers about in this newsletter. But these anecdotes represent an unusually broad and multi-year national trend. FBI data released earlier this month showed that nationally, every major violent crime category fell last year, in “the largest year-to-year decline in violent crime rates since FBI estimations began” in the 1930s.
Not every crime category is falling in every community, but the decline is remarkably widespread. “The crime drop is happening pretty much everywhere,” crime analyst Jeff Asher wrote last month, citing his Real-Time Crime Index tool that collects data from hundreds of law enforcement agencies.
While the decline of the past few years is hard to deny, the reasons are much less clear. Early on, many experts viewed falling crime rates as a return to normal after a spike in 2020 and 2021, when murders and other offenses soared. Scholars attributed that jump to a number of causes, including a loss of social connection, schooling, and jobs during the COVID-19 pandemic. But crime hasn’t just gone back to pre-pandemic levels — it has continued to drop to new, historic lows.
Some criminologists have pointed to a boost in government funding through bills like the American Rescue Plan Act, a 2021 federal law that invested $350 billion in state and government agencies for programs across public health, safety, welfare and education. Criminologist John Roman told The Pew Charitable Trusts that there is an “amazing correlation” where “as the number of local government employees ticks up, crime — particularly gun violence and homicide — declines proportionately.”
Others have tied the declines more directly to law enforcement. They cite the growing use of “evidence-based policing,” when police rely on crime data and research to direct resources to locations where incidents are most likely to occur, prioritizing the most serious offenses.
Some cities have overhauled public safety programs in the past few years to respond to high crime rates. Baltimore city leaders deployed the Group Violence Reduction Strategy in 2022, after seven consecutive years with more than 300 homicides. The approach combines community violence intervention programs, victim services, enhanced police investigations and focused deterrence strategies. Researchers found that shootings and homicides dropped by one-third in districts where the strategy had been deployed, compared with similar districts where it hadn’t. Another violence intervention program in Philadelphia was linked to a substantial reduction in shootings from 2020 to 2022.
Some experts also argue that violent crime reductions create a kind of virtuous cycle. In New Orleans, just a few years ago, homicide detectives were assigned 15 or 16 cases a year each. Now that number is closer to three or four. The New Orleans Times-Picayune reported this week that “the lighter caseload gives detectives more time to dig into investigations and make arrests — something police and their supporters say can prevent one killing from spawning another.”
Still, with crime drops happening across the U.S., programs and dynamics isolated to specific cities don’t paint a complete picture. And all the approaches mentioned have critics as well, who dispute their effectiveness or point to possible negative effects.
“This is a case in which success truly has a thousand fathers, not just one,” Council on Criminal Justice President and CEO Adam Gelb told the Detroit News. “Everybody is looking for a single easy explanation and that doesn’t exist. There is no magic wand. It’s happening all over the map across the nation and around the globe.”
Sorting out why crime fell is one thing. Figuring out the political consequences is another. Violent crime has long been among the most potent issues for voters — even when public perception and reality do not match — so falling violence inevitably invites politicians and partisans to claim credit for their own particular approach.
In California, Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom has credited declines to investments in law enforcement and violence prevention. Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, meanwhile, has touted tougher bail laws and a focus on repeat offenders. Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson, a Democrat, has highlighted investments in housing, jobs and community programs. In Dallas, Democrat-turned-Republican Mayor Eric Johnson has credited a focus on repeat violent offenders.
At the national level, The Trump administration has also claimed responsibility, hailing the current trends as a “decisive reversal of the crime crisis Democrats left behind.” The statement ignored that crime spiked during President Donald Trump’s first term and noticeably declined around the midpoint of Joe Biden’s presidency.
The day the FBI crime report was released, Trump took to the stage to argue that National Guard deployments had effectively suppressed crime in Washington D.C. “Two years ago, we were in a hellhole, and now we have one of the safest cities,” he said. Studies have found no association between crime drops in the city and the National Guard’s presence. A recent investigation by Reuters could not find any records of guard members assisting local police in neighborhoods where the vast majority of D.C.’s murders occur.
With the midterms approaching, many Republican candidates and their backers are claiming Democrats cannot deliver on public safety. Some Democrats, meanwhile, contend that the Republicans’ tactics — including the mobilization of federal law enforcement — have made Americans feel unsafe. Democrats in Missouri, Colorado, Wisconsin and elsewhere have won their primaries on platforms that promote a holistic approach to public safety, including targeted policing tactics, community prevention programs and investments in mental health resources.
In May, ads created by the National Republican Senatorial Committee credited Republicans with the national crime decline and argued that Democratic candidates for Michigan’s open Senate seat “want to turn back the clock and bring back Joe Biden and Chuck Schumer’s pro-crime agenda that vilifies law enforcement, denies them crucial resources and prioritizes dangerous illegal immigrants.”
The Senate Leadership Fund, a Republican super PAC, has spent $17 million on crime-focused attack ads in North Carolina’s Senate race, criticizing Democrat Roy Cooper’s decision to settle a lawsuit while governor that released 3,500 prisoners to curb COVID-19 infections. And in the Texas Senate race, Attorney General Ken Paxton held a press conference in July surrounded by police, claiming opponent James Talarico has “one of the most anti-law enforcement records in the history of Texas,” alleging that Talarico had previously supported defunding the police, a claim he denies.