Data collected from 35 US cities showed a 21% drop in the homicide rate from 2024 to 2025, meaning about 922 fewer homicides last year, according to a new study. Report from the Independent Criminal Justice Council.
The report, released Thursday, tracked 13 crimes and recorded declines last year in 11 of those categories including car theft, theft, aggravated assaults and others. The study found that drug crimes saw a slight increase compared to last year and that sexual assaults continued even between 2024 and 2025.
Cities and states outside of those surveyed showed similar declines in homicides and other crimes, experts said. But they said it’s too early to know what’s driving the change even as elected officials at all levels — both Democrats and Republicans — claim credit for it.
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 has seen historic declines. The study found that some cities posted decades-low numbers, with the overall homicide rate falling to its lowest levels in decades
“It’s a dramatic decline to a level that is absolutely astonishing. And while we celebrate it, we also need to unpack it and try to understand it,” Gelb said. “There is no single reason why crime rates go up or down.”
The council collects data from police departments and other law enforcement sources. Some report categories included data from as many as 35 cities, while others, due to differences in definitions of specific crimes or tracking gaps, included fewer cities in their totals. Many of the property crimes cited in the report also decreased, including a 27% drop in vehicle thefts and a 10% drop in shoplifting among the cities surveyed in the report.
The council’s report showed a decline in the homicide rate in 31 of 35 cities, including declines of 40% or more in Denver, Omaha, Nebraska and Washington. The only city listed that reported a double-digit increase is Little Rock, Arkansas, where the rate is up 16% since 2024.
The dramatic decline in crime has made some criminologists question the historical understanding of what drives violent crime trends and how to combat them, Gelb said.
“We want to believe that local factors really matter to crime numbers, and that it’s essentially a neighborhood problem with neighborhood-level solutions,” he said. “We now see that very broad social, cultural and economic forces at the national level can assert enormous influence on what happens at the local level.”
Republicans, many of whom called the decline in violent crime in many cities in 2024 unreliable, were quick to say that tough stances on crime such as the deployment of the National Guard in cities like New Orleans and the nation’s capital, along with increases in immigration operations, all played a role in this year’s declines.
However, cities that saw no increase in troopers or federal agents saw similarly historic declines 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 declines.
Jens Ludwig, a professor of public policy and director of the University of Chicago’s Crime Lab, stressed that many factors can contribute to reducing crime, whether that’s increased spending on law enforcement or increased spending on education to improve graduation rates.
“The fact that we’re seeing crime rates decline in any single city in so many neighborhoods and in so many categories means that it can’t be any particular project in a neighborhood that’s enacted by the mayor,” Ludwig said. Because the decline is occurring in multiple cities, “it’s not as if any individual mayor is a genius at spotting it.”
While no one often knows what drives large fluctuations in crime numbers, the decline may be in part due to continued normalization after large spikes in crime for several years during the pandemic, he said. The hypothesis that emphasizes declines may not hold.
“If you look at violent crime rates in the United States, they’re more volatile from year to year than the poverty rate or the unemployment rate; it’s one of those big social indicators that fluctuates a lot from year to year,” Ludwig said. “Regardless of the credit for these declines, I think it is too early for anyone on either side of this to declare mission accomplished.”