The FBI’s 2025 Data Shows the Largest Violent-Crime Drop Since 1936. Nobody Agrees on Why.
The FBI’s 2025 Uniform Crime Report, released August 14, 2026 and covering agencies representing roughly 90 to 96 percent of the U.S. population, shows violent crime fell 9.3 percent from 2024 to 2025 — the largest single-year decline the Bureau has recorded since it began producing national crime estimates in 1936. Robbery fell 18.5 percent. Rape fell 7.6 percent. Aggravated assault fell 7.2 percent. Property crime fell 12.4 percent overall, driven by a 15.8 percent drop in burglary and a 22.7 percent drop in motor vehicle theft. Reported hate crimes fell roughly 7 percent.
Murder and nonnegligent manslaughter fell hardest of all: down 18.1 percent, pulling the national murder rate to 4.1 per 100,000 people — tied with 1955 and 1956 for the lowest rate since the FBI began estimating it in 1936, and the lowest in the Bureau’s own standardized reporting series, which begins in 1960. Roughly 14,000 Americans were still murdered in 2025. The rate is historically low; the total is not zero, and the arc that produced it started well before this year.
One number moved the opposite direction. Agencies reported 90,178 assaults on law enforcement officers in 2025 — a rate of 13.8 assaults per 100 officers, the highest rate in the past ten years — even as the violent crime civilians experienced fell to one of its lowest points on record. The FBI’s own data does not explain the divergence; it simply reports both.
The 4.1 figure is the end of a seven-year arc, not a single-year anomaly, and the shape of that arc matters more than the headline number. The murder rate stood at 5.1 per 100,000 in 2019, the last full pre-pandemic year. It jumped to 6.5 in 2020 — a 28.8 percent single-year increase that was, at the time, the largest ever recorded — and kept climbing to roughly 6.8 in 2021, the pandemic-era peak. From there it fell every year: 6.3 in 2022, down 6 percent; 5.7 in 2023, down 10.2 percent, a decline analysts called the fastest ever recorded at the time; 5.0 in 2024, down 14.9 percent and the lowest rate since 2015; and 4.1 in 2025, down 18.1 percent and tied for the lowest rate since 1936. Peak to trough, the rate has fallen roughly 40 percent since 2021.
That timeline is worth sitting with, because 2025 is the third consecutive year the FBI has recorded a record-setting drop in murder — not the first. Jeff Asher, the independent analyst who runs AH Datalytics and whose real-time estimates have tracked closely with the FBI’s official releases for years, put it plainly: “This release confirms that crime in the U.S. is falling at or near a historic clip. This is the third straight year of a record drop in murder, and the data for 2026 points to a continued large drop this year.” The decline did not begin when the current administration’s second term began in January 2025 — it began in 2022, accelerated through 2023 and 2024, and continued into 2025.
National averages hide enormous variation between individual cities, and the city-level data is where any clean partisan story falls apart fastest. The Council on Criminal Justice, tracking roughly 35 major cities, found 31 of 35 posted homicide declines in 2025 — 922 fewer homicides combined across the sample, including a roughly 40 percent drop in Denver, CO. City and police department data puts Denver’s specific 2025 figure at 37 homicides, down 48 percent from 70 the year before — among the largest declines of any major U.S. city — under Mayor Mike Johnston (D). Washington, D.C. saw homicides fall 40 to 45 percent under outgoing Mayor Muriel Bowser (D) — the one city in the sample with a clearer federal-causation story, since President Trump federalized D.C.’s Metropolitan Police Department and deployed the National Guard starting August 11, 2025. Omaha’s homicides fell 40 percent under Mayor John Ewing (D), the city’s first Democratic mayor since 2009.
Denver’s mayor pushed back hard on the idea that federal policy drove his city’s number. Johnston has said the drop came in spite of, not because of, the administration — Denver received no federal funding tied to the decline and credits local investments in violence intervention instead.
2025 crime data shows violent crime plummeted across the country. Murder rates dropped by more than 18%, contributing to the biggest nationwide decrease in violent crime in nearly 90 years.
Not every city moved the same direction. Little Rock’s homicides rose 16 percent year over year in 2025; Fort Worth rose 2 percent; Milwaukee rose 1 percent. Zoom out to a seven-year window, though, and Milwaukee’s trend reverses the story again — homicides there are up 42 percent since 2019, the largest seven-year increase of any city CCJ tracks, while Baltimore’s are down 60 percent over the same seven years, the largest seven-year decrease in the sample. A 2025 peer-reviewed study found a mayor’s party affiliation has, in the researchers’ words, “little to no causal effect” on police spending, arrests, or crime rates — the local drivers run deeper than who holds the office.
President Trump touted the numbers personally. “Today I’m thrilled to announce that the FBI has just released the new Uniform Crime Report showing that in 2025, we achieved the single largest reduction in violent crime in American history,” he told graduates at the Nassau County Police Academy on August 14, 2026. FBI Director Kash Patel made a similar case in a statement carried by CBS News, NBC News and UPI: “The 2025 crime data in this report shows the single largest decrease in violent crime and murder since 1937 — as well as huge decreases across the board in terms of aggravated assault, rape, and robbery.”
Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt has tied administration policy to falling crime figures repeatedly. At a February 5, 2026 briefing addressing an earlier round of city-level murder data, she said: “This dramatic decline is what happens when a president secures the border, fully mobilizes federal law enforcement to arrest violent criminals, and aggressively deports the worst of the worst illegal aliens from our country.” She struck the same note again in a July 30, 2026 post about a separate, more recent dataset — first-half 2026 figures, not the full-year 2025 UCR release this story covers:
Law and Order is back. In the first half of 2026 vs. the same period last year: Homicides are down 18%...
Every criminologist who studies the numbers for a living says the causal story is far less settled than either political side suggests. Adam Gelb, president and CEO of the Council on Criminal Justice, called the decline “historic and crystal clear” — but added that “right now, what’s driving it is about as clear as a glass of milk.” Georgia State criminologist Thaddeus Johnson framed the caution differently: “We need to think not only about 10 days but also 10 years from now.” PolitiFact rated Trump’s broader claim of the “lowest crime rate in 125 years” Half True — the murder-rate claim specifically holds up, since the FBI’s standardized data series only extends back to 1960, making 4.1 per 100,000 the lowest in at least 65 years of consistent methodology, but the “125 years” framing leans on a longer historical reconstruction built on far less consistent pre-1960 data collection.
Two figures complicate any triumphant read of the data, and both deserve equal billing with the headline drop. The first is the 90,178 assaults on law enforcement officers in 2025 — a rate of 13.8 per 100 officers, a ten-year high, moving in the opposite direction from nearly every other crime category the FBI tracks. The second is money, not violence: the Department of Justice terminated more than 365 individual grants, worth roughly $811 million combined, that funded gun-violence prevention programs, crime-victim services and local law-enforcement support — cuts, not increases, in exactly the kind of programs both parties have historically credited with helping drive crime rates down.
None of this erases the topline number. Violent crime fell 9.3 percent, the murder rate fell to a level tied for the lowest in ninety years of federal record-keeping, and that decline is real, verified by the FBI’s own reporting agencies. What the data does not support is a single, clean story about why — not from the White House, and not from its critics. The honest read is the one Gelb gave: historic, and murky.
The FBI’s 2025 numbers are real and historic: violent crime down 9.3%, murder down 18.1%, the murder rate tied for the lowest since national record-keeping began in 1936. But the decline is a seven-year arc that started under a different administration, plays out unevenly city by city — the three biggest metro declines all sit under Democratic mayors, one tied directly to a federal intervention in D.C. — and comes bundled with a ten-year high in assaults on police and $811 million in terminated federal crime-prevention grants. Every criminologist on record agrees the numbers are solid; none will call the explanation settled.
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- 03.FBI Crime Data Explorer (Primary dataset)·Interactive UCR data tool — the underlying agency-level dataset behind every national figure cited here
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- 14.The Washington Post·Context and pushback on the administration's framing of the new crime statistics