A new report released Thursday says homicide rates fell sharply in 35 U.S. cities from 2024 to 2025, with the overall homicide rate dropping to its lowest level in decades.
The Council on Criminal Justice said its analysis found a 21% decrease in the homicide rate from 2024 to 2025, translating to about 922 fewer homicides last year. The study tracked 13 crime categories and recorded drops in 11 of them.
Among the categories that declined, the report cited carjackings, shoplifting and aggravated assaults, along with other tracked crimes. It found drug crimes rose slightly and that sexual assaults stayed even between 2024 and 2025.
The council said its data collection draws from police departments and other law enforcement sources, and that the number of cities contributing to each category varies. It said some categories include data from as many as 35 cities, while others use fewer cities because of differences in how crimes are defined or because of gaps in tracking.
The report said the homicide rate decreased in 31 of 35 cities. It also described several places where decreases were especially large, including Denver, Omaha, Nebraska, and Washington, each with a 40% or more decline, while saying Little Rock, Arkansas was the only city in the set with a double-digit increase, rising by 16% from 2024.
In addition to homicide, the report said property-crime categories in the participating cities also fell, including a 27% drop in vehicle thefts and a 10% drop in shoplifting.
Council President and CEO Adam Gelb said the report reflects an inflection after earlier spikes during the COVID-19 pandemic. “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, adding: “There’s never one reason crime goes up or down.”
Gelb said the broad decreases are prompting questions among some criminologists about historic understandings of what drives trends in violent crime and how to address them. “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, while also saying “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.”
Elected officials have rushed to credit their own approaches for the 2025 drops, with both Republicans and Democratic mayors citing their policies. The AP report said Republicans pointed to tough-on-crime stances such as deploying the National Guard to cities like New Orleans and to immigration operation surges, while the council’s study said cities without surges of troops or federal agents still saw similar historic declines in violent and other crimes.
Jens Ludwig, a public policy professor and the Director of the University of Chicago Crime Lab, said the decreases reflect multiple contributing factors rather than any single local effort. “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. He added that because the decline is occurring in more than one city, “it’s not like any individual mayor is a genius in figuring this out.”
Ludwig said there is uncertainty about how long the drop will last and suggested the declines could be connected to normalization after several years of pandemic-era spikes. He also said violent crime rates are more volatile year to year than indicators such as the poverty rate or unemployment rate, and he warned: “Regardless of credit for these declines, I think it’s too soon for anybody on either side of this to declare mission accomplished.”