Homicide rate declines sharply in dozens of US cities, a new report shows

Experts said cities and states beyond those surveyed showed similar declines in homicides and other crimes. But they said it's too early to tell what is prompting the change even as elected officials at all levels — both Democrats and Republicans — have been claiming credit.

Adam Gelb, president and CEO of the council — a nonpartisan think tank for criminal justice policy and research — said that after historic increases in violence during the COVID-19 pandemic, this year brought historic decreases. The study found some cities recorded decades-low numbers, with the overall homicide rate dropping to its lowest in decades

“It’s a dramatic drop to an absolutely astonishing level. As we celebrate it we also need to unpack and try to understand it,” Gelb said. “There’s never one reason crime goes up or down.”

The council collects data from police departments and other law enforcement sources. Some of the report categories included data from as many as 35 cities, while others because of differences in definitions for specific crimes or tracking gaps, include fewer cities in their totals. Many of the property crimes in the report also declined, including a 27% drop in vehicle thefts and 10% drop in shoplifting among the reporting cities.

The council's report showed a decrease in the homicide rate in 31 of 35 cities including a 40% decrease or more in Denver, Omaha, Nebraska, and Washington. The only city included that reported a double-digit increase was Little Rock, Arkansas, where the rate increased by 16% from 2024.

Gelb said the broad crime rate decreases have made some criminologists question historic understandings of what drives trends in violent crime and how to battle it.

“We want to believe that local factors really matter for crime numbers, that it is fundamentally a neighborhood problem with neighborhood level solutions,” he said. “We’re now 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.”

Republicans, many of whom called the decrease in violent crime in many cities in 2024 unreliable, have rushed to say that tough-on-crime stances like deploying the National Guard to cities like New Orleans and the nation's capital, coupled with immigration operation surges, have all played a roll in this year’s drops.

However, cities that saw no surges of either troops or federal agents saw similar historic drops in violent and other crimes, according to the Council’s annual report.

Democratic mayors are also touting their policies as playing roles in the 2025 decreases.

Jens Ludwig, a public policy professor and the Director of the University of Chicago Crime Lab, stressed that many factors can contribute to a reduction in crime, whether that's increased spending on law enforcement or increased spending on education to improve graduation rates.

“The fact that in any individual city, we are seeing crime drop across so many neighborhoods and in so many categories, means it can’t be any particular pet project in a neighborhood enacted by a mayor," Ludwig said. And because the decrease is happening in multiple cities, “it's not like any individual mayor is a genius in figuring this out.”

He said while often nobody knows what drives big swings in crime numbers, the decrease could be in part due to the continued normalization after big spikes in crime for several years during the pandemic. A hypothesis that stresses the declines might not last.

“If you look at violent crime rates in the U.S., it is much more volatile year to year than the poverty rate, or the unemployment rate; It is one of those big social indicators that just swings around a lot year to year,” Ludwig said. “Regardless of credit for these declines, I think it’s too soon for anybody on either side of this to declare mission accomplished.”