The Good News About Crime

The Atlantic

16-05-2025

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You don't hear a lot of good news these days, and you hear even less good news about crime. In fact, this is a consistent structural problem with crime reporting. When crime is rising, it gets a great deal of attention—following the old newsroom adage that ' if it bleeds, it leads.'
Most news consumers are probably aware that starting in 2020, the United States witnessed one of the most remarkable increases in crime in its history. Murder rose by the highest annual rate recorded (going back to the start of reliable records, in 1960) from 2019 to 2020. Some criminal-justice-reform advocates, concerned that the increase would doom nascent progress, tried to play it down. They were right to point out that violent crime was still well below the worst peaks of the 1980s and '90s, but wrong to dismiss the increase entirely. Such a steep, consistent, and national rise is scary, and each data point represents a horror for real people.
What happened after that is less heralded: Crime is down since then. Although final statistics are not yet available, some experts think that 2024 likely set the record for the steepest fall in the murder rate. And 2025 is off to an even better start. The year is not yet half over, and a lot can still change—just consider 2020, when murder really took off in the second half—but the Real-Time Crime Index, which draws on a national sample, finds that through March, murder is down 21.6 percent, violent crime is down 11 percent, and property crime is down 13.8 percent. In April, Chicago had 20 murders. That's not just lower than in any April of the past few years—that's the best April since 1962, early in Richard J. Daley's mayorship.
One of the great challenges of reporting on crime is the lack and lateness of good statistics. The best numbers come from the FBI, but they aren't released until the fall of the following year. Still, we can get a pretty good idea of the trends from the data that are available. The Council on Criminal Justice analyzed 2024 data from 40 cities on 13 categories of crime, and found that all but one (shoplifting) dropped from 2023. Homicide was down 16 percent among cities in the sample that reported data, and in cities with especially high numbers of murders, such as St. Louis, Baltimore, and Detroit, they fell to 2014 levels. Even carjacking, which suddenly had become more common in recent years, was down to below 2020 levels—though motor-vehicle theft was higher.
A separate report from the Major Cities Chiefs Association, which gathers leaders of police departments in the biggest cities, found similar trends: a 16 percent drop in homicide from 2023, and smaller reductions in rape, robbery, and aggravated assault.
Another great challenge of reporting on crime is how vague our understanding is of what drives changes in crime. Even now, scholars disagree about what led to the long decline in crime from the 1990s until the 2010s. One popular theory for the 2020 rise has been that it was connected to the murder of George Floyd and the resulting protests, though that allows for several possible pathways: Were police too occupied with protests to deal with ordinary crime? Were they de-policing as a sort of protest (the ' blue flu ')—or were they pulling back because that was the message the protests were sending them and their leaders? Did the attention to brutal law enforcement delegitimize police in the eyes of citizens, encouraging a rise in criminal behavior? Any or all of these are possible, in various proportions.
A Brookings Institution report published in December contends that the pandemic itself was the prime culprit. The authors argue that murder was already rising when Floyd was killed. 'The spike in murders during 2020 was directly connected to local unemployment and school closures in low-income areas,' they write. 'Cities with larger numbers of young men forced out of work and teen boys pushed out of school in low-income neighborhoods during March and early April, had greater increases in homicide from May to December that year, on average.' Because many of these unemployment and school-closure-related trends continued for years, they believe this explains why high murder rates persisted in 2021 and 2022 before falling. The journalist Alec MacGillis has also done powerful reporting that makes a similar argument.
Recognizing the real trends in crime rates is important in part because disorder, real or perceived, creates openings for demagoguery. Throughout his time in politics, President Donald Trump has exaggerated or outright misrepresented the state of crime in the United States, and has used it to push for both stricter and more brutal policing. He has also argued that deportations will reduce crime—with his administration going so far as to delete a Justice Department webpage with a report noting that undocumented immigrants commit crime at lower rates than native citizens in Texas.
The irony is that Trump's policy choices could slow or even reverse the positive trends currently occurring. Reuters reports that the Justice Department has eliminated more than $800 million in grants through the Office of Justice Programs. Giffords, a gun-control group founded by former U.S. Representative Gabby Giffords, warns that this includes important aid to local police departments for preventing gun violence and other forms of crime: 'Trump is destabilizing the very foundations of violence prevention programs across the country.' The administration's economic policies also threaten to drive the U.S. into recession, which tends to cause increases in crime, as it may have done in 2020.
Upticks in crime driven by misguided policy choices would be tragic, especially coming just as the shock of 2020 is fading. Good news isn't just hard to find—it can also be fleeting.
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