Urban crime in record breaking decline

The Hill - Violent crime fell dramatically in 2025, in what experts expect to be the year with the sharpest drop in homicides in recorded history. The decline, detailed in two recent reports of major U.S. cities, follows a trend that began in 2022, after the COVID-19 pandemic saw a record-breaking spike in homicides.

“This is the fourth year in a row of declines, and each year has gotten a little bigger than the year before. And this is the first time that we’ve seen it in all of the categories, I think seven of the eight categories fell by close to a record amount,” John Roman, director of the Center on Public Safety and Justice at NORC at the University of Chicago, said in an interview Monday, referring to the eight major crime categories that the FBI tracks. 

...The FBI has not yet published its official crime statistics for 2025, but the findings are expected to align with recent reports from the Major Cities Chiefs Association’s (MCCA) violent crime survey, released earlier this month, and the Council on Criminal Justice’s (CCJ) year-end crime update, released late January.

The MCCA survey, including data from 67 of 68 responding agencies, shows from 2024 to 2025, homicide is down 19.3 percent, rape is down 8.8 percent, robbery is down 19.8 percent, and aggravated assault is down 9.7 percent.

The CCJ report — which includes data from 40 large American cities, though not every city reports data for every crime — shows from 2024 to 2025, homicides dropped by 21 percent, robbery decreased by 23 percent, and aggravated assault declined by 9 percent. 

Many experts...say the primary driver of plummeting crime rates is the sharp increase in crime in 2020 and 2021. 

...Some point to the investments in community violence intervention programs as successful, but others say it’s difficult to prove the effectiveness of those programs and the evidence has been mixed in their results.

Emily Owens, a professor of criminology and economics at the University of California, Irvine, agreed that the national trend suggests a larger reason. 

“The consistency of the homicide decline, both across cities and over time, makes me inclined to think this has to do with larger social movements, temporarily disrupted by COVID-19 when the world turned upside down, than with any one particular thing one particular city might be doing,” Owens said in an analysis of the data.

White House spokesperson Abigail Jackson pushed back on suggestions that funding contributed to crime drop. The legislation, which included $350 billion for state and local governments, was signed by President Biden in 2021.