If you watch the nightly news or listen to the rhetoric of politicians, you might think that the United States is experiencing an epidemic of violent crime. The reality is that violent crime rates are way down from historic highs in the nineties and a spike during the COVID-19 pandemic.
In my July column on media’s influence on perceptions of crime, I noted that the U.S. appears on track to record the lowest number of per-capita killings ever in 2025. More recently, the Council on Criminal Justice (CCJ), a nonpartisan think tank, released their “Crime Trends in U.S. Cities Mid-Year 2025 Update.” Preliminary CCJ data show that U.S. murder rate remains on track to approach historic lows.
Building on significant reductions in the U.S. murder rate in 2023 and 2024, preliminary CCJ data show that the number of murders was down by 17% in the first half of 2025 compared to the same period in 2024. CCJ data from 2025 show declines in all forms of crime that were tracked compared to the same period in 2024, except for drug use (no change) and reported motor vehicle theft (increasing). Looking back to before the pandemic, murder rates in the first half of 2025 are 14% lower than in the first half of 2019. These data are preliminary. However, we can cautiously infer that we are headed in the right direction.
Murders and violent crime peaked in the mid-nineties. There was an increase in violent crimes, including murders, in the pandemic. In 2020, young people, especially young men who are particularly at risk of committing or getting victimized by crime, were out of school, out of work, without vital support systems, and unbridled by many traditional social controls. Gun sales hit a historic high in 2020. Violent crime spiked. Post-pandemic, violent crime and murder rates have now fallen to below pre-pandemic levels. Returning to pre-pandemic routines and their associated social supports has mitigated many of the social conditions that are conducive to violent crime.
Legislators often campaign on “tough on crime” policies that are intended to deter lawbreaking. Increased funding for criminal justice agencies promises to increase their crime prevention capacity. If 2025 does see the lowest murder rate on record, President Trump and his allies will likely attribute this to border policies, ICE’s enforcement of immigration law, and deportation of “criminal illegals.” These initiatives might impact crime rates moving forward, but murder rates were already plummeting under the Biden administration.
It is a common assumption that the criminal justice system prevents crime. It is likely that elevated rates of murder during COVID were, in part, the result of how policing occurred amid the pandemic and “de-policing” in the aftermath of the murder of George Floyd. The number of police officers in the U.S. is smaller today than it was before the pandemic according to Police Executive Research Forum. Despite fewer police officers on the job, murder rates have fallen for three years in a row.
Local and state authorities in many parts of the country implemented community violence intervention initiatives in response to the pandemic-era surge in murders. These crime-reduction interventions task law enforcement and partnering agencies to deal with gun violence and address the risk conditions in historically disadvantaged communities. These initiatives likely contributed to the multi-year drop in violent crime.
Declining murder rates are encouraging, but the U.S. still has a serious murder problem. Compared to most other developed nations, the U.S. is plagued by extremely high murder rates. Violent crime in the U.S. has declined since the nineties, but violent crime has become increasingly lethal. CCJ data show that the share of violence that results in death was about 3.6 times higher in 2020 than in 1994. Additionally, there are significant racial disparities among offenders and victims of murder in the U.S. There is much work that still needs to be done to both improve our crime data infrastructure and implement evidence-based practices to control and prevent crime in our nation.
Roscoe Scarborough, Ph.D. is chair of the Department of Social Sciences and associate professor of sociology at College of Coastal Georgia. He is an associate scholar at the Reg Murphy Center for Economic and Policy Studies. He can be reached by email at rscarborough@ccga.edu.
Reg Murphy Center