Homicide rate declines sharply in dozens of US cities, a new report
shows
[January 22, 2026]
By CLAUDIA LAUER
Data collected from 35 American cities showed a 21% decrease in the
homicide rate from 2024 to 2025, translating to about 922 fewer
homicides last year, according to a new report from the independent
Council on Criminal Justice.
The report, released on Thursday, tracked 13 crimes and recorded drops
last year in 11 of those categories including carjackings, shoplifting,
aggravated assaults and others. Drug crimes saw a small increase over
last year and sexual assaults stayed even between 2024 and 2025, the
study found.
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.”
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The west facade of the Supreme Court Building bears the motto "Equal
Justice Under Law" on March 20, 2019, in Washington. (AP Photo/J.
Scott Applewhite, File)
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.”
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