The Trump Administration Is Taking Credit for a Long-Running Murder Decline

When Donald Trump ran for president in 2024, he said he’d “restore law and order.” The White House is now taking a victory lap on this campaign promise.

On Thursday, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt touted a January report from the Council on Criminal Justice, which found “that the murder rate across America’s largest cities plummeted in 2025 to its lowest level since at least 1900,” according to Leavitt, who added that this was “the largest single-year drop in murders in recorded history.”

“This dramatic decline,” she said, “is what happens when a president secures the border, fully mobilizes federal law enforcement to arrest violent criminals and aggressively deport the worst of the worst illegal aliens from our country.”

The decline is noteworthy, but it is not especially surprising, given recent trends. “We’re seeing the largest one-year drop in murder for the third straight year in 2025,” crime data analyst Jeff Asher told Reason‘s Billy Binion earlier this week. “We’re seeing the murder rate at the lowest level that we’ve ever recorded it.”

While we won’t know the exact drop in the 2025 murder rate until official data come out in August or September of this year, Asher expects the decline to be “somewhere in the 18 to 20 percent range.” This would “supplant 2024, which supplanted 2023 as the largest one-year drop ever recorded.”

The exact reason for this decline is unknown. Some have theorized that trauma care at emergency rooms has improved, which has led to fewer casualties from shootings. That’s “a factor,” says Asher, but it doesn’t tell the whole story.

“We can show pretty convincingly with shooting data that murder has fallen the last years because shootings have fallen dramatically — not major improvements in trauma care,” Asher recently wrote on his Substack. “We can also show that shootings have not become less lethal over the last 10 to 15 years suggesting that any gains from better trauma care — which have undoubtedly occurred — may have been offset by changes in firearm availability.”

It’s not just the murder rate that is falling; crime as a whole is on the decline. As Our World in Data recently pointed out, violent crime rates in the U.S. “have more than halved,” since the early 1990s. In that time, property crimes have also fallen by about 60 percent.

These positive trends suggest that society is progressing and becoming safer. That may well be true, but the way we report and track crimes also matters. In cities like Washington, D.C., “crime is underreported,” says Asher. This includes about “a third of property crimes and about half of violent crimes other than murder.” There are myriad reasons for this, including how local and federal law enforcement agencies interact and share information, and personal preferences—sometimes people just don’t want to report a crime that’s happened to them.

Still, “there’s no reason to suspect that the overarching trends that we’re seeing are not accurate,” he says.

While it’s still too early to officially say, all signs indicate that 2025 will have the largest drop in murder rates in recorded history. The Trump administration will likely take credit for this feat, but this probably would have happened regardless of who was in the White House.

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