While many American cities are painted as bastions of murder, it appears that this is no longer the case. A new report released last week shows that the U.S. logged a more than 20% drop in the homicide rate from 2024 to 2025, marking the largest single-year fall on record (and possibly the lowest homicide rate in the country in 125 years). But while both Democrats and Republicans are taking credit for this drop in crime, analysts say there is more to the story than politics.
What did the commentators say?
The study, published by the independent Council on Criminal Justice, analyzed crime data from 40 of the largest American cities. It was found that the “rate of reported homicides was 21% lower in 2025 than in 2024 in the 35 study cities providing data for that crime, representing 922 fewer homicides,” said the study. When the data is finalized, there is a “strong possibility that homicides in 2025 will drop to about 4.0 per 100,000 residents,” which would be the “lowest rate ever recorded in law enforcement or public health data going back to 1900.”
This marks a significant shift from the Covid-era spikes in crime, and “elected officials at all levels — both Democrats and Republicans — have been claiming credit,” said The Associated Press. But even with this data, experts say it’s “too early to tell what is prompting the change.” There is “never one reason crime goes up or down,” said Adam Gelb, the president and CEO of the Council on Criminal Justice, to the AP. Analysts are “seeing that broad, very broad social, cultural and economic forces at the national level can assert huge influence on what happens at the local level.”
President Donald Trump has claimed that his deployment of the National Guard in cities such as Washington, D.C., has drastically reduced crime. But homicide rates began falling during former President Joe Biden’s administration, and “there is little to justify any claim that Trump is responsible for last year’s drop in crime,” said The New York Times. There are “many more cities that didn’t have the National Guard that saw their crime go down than cities that had the National Guard who saw their crime go down,” said Alex Piquero, who served as the Biden administration’s head of the Bureau of Justice Statistics, to the Times.
But while Republicans may not be responsible for the drop in homicides, Democrats may not be either. Rather than politics, countries with a “stronger market orientation may experience lower rates of homicide,” said a separate study from the University of Georgia. This is a concept that references how a “nation’s economy functions within a framework of legal rights and freedoms.” Researchers found that a “stronger market orientation could decrease murder rates, with even a one-point shift on a market freedom scale leading to a 22% drop in homicides.”
What next?
The drop in homicides could just reflect an up-and-down pattern, as murders had been “steadily dropping since the late 2000s” before the Covid spike, senior research specialist Ernesto López, the study’s lead author, told CBS News. It is “possible that these rates reflect a longer-term downward trend punctuated by periods of elevated homicides.”
In another piece of good news, the study found that other crime rates had fallen, too. Carjackings declined 27% from 2024 to 2025, burglaries fell 18%, larcenies fell 11% and shoplifting dropped 10%, according to the study.
There could be more to the issue than politics