The murder rate has reached a 70-year low - and a combination of focused policing, treatment and renewed accountability suggests the decline can continue.
Something remarkable is happening in Donald Trump’s America: People are being murdered at a rate not seen in 70 years.
The national murder rate fell to 4.1 per 100,000 people in 2025, tying the rates recorded in 1955 and 1956. Murder declined 18.1 percent in a single year, while robbery, aggravated assault, motor-vehicle theft and burglary also fell substantially. Preliminary figures from major cities suggest the decline has continued into 2026.
This is more than a statistical recovery from the disorder of 2020. In many cities, murder has fallen below its pre-pandemic level. The trend crosses geographic and political boundaries, appearing in large and small cities governed by Republicans and Democrats. No president, mayor or police chief can claim all the credit.
Donald Trump, however, undoubtedly deserves some.
The crime decline began before Trump returned to office in January 2025, but his administration has applied additional pressure through federal-local law-enforcement partnerships, fugitive arrests, gun prosecutions, immigration enforcement and targeted deployments in particularly troubled cities. In Washington, the administration’s surge produced thousands of additional arrests and prosecutions as homicides, carjackings and vehicle thefts fell sharply.
Not every arrest resulted in a sustainable prosecution, and some federal initiatives have been clumsily executed. But the underlying message — that public disorder will no longer be ignored — has probably contributed to changing expectations among police, prosecutors and offenders.
The most successful local examples suggest that neither the traditional left nor right has the complete answer. Baltimore has dramatically reduced murder through a strategy combining services with consequences. Officials identify the relatively small number of people most likely to shoot or be shot, offer them housing and employment assistance, and warn them that continued violence will bring concentrated prosecutorial attention. Arrests for minor offenses did not increase, but arrests for serious violent crimes did.
San Francisco is following a similar course under Democratic Mayor Daniel Lurie. The city still provides shelters, treatment and supportive housing, but Lurie has rejected the idea that compassion requires tolerating drug markets, encampments and chronic predation. San Francisco recorded only 28 homicides in 2025, its fewest since 1954.
That is the emerging formula: better investigations, modern technology, community cooperation, targeted intervention and credible punishment. It is not mass incarceration, but neither is it permissiveness. It recognizes that murder is extremely concentrated among a small number of offenders and within a small number of neighborhoods.
There are reasons to believe the decline can continue. Police departments are becoming better at sharing information and using cameras, cellphone records, drones and license-plate readers. Homicide clearance rates have improved in cities such as Baltimore. Communities exhausted by gang violence are cooperating more readily with investigators. Prosecutors are concentrating resources on repeat violent offenders rather than trying to arrest their way out of every social problem.
The political benefits could be considerable for Republicans in November.
Crime has traditionally been one of the GOP’s strongest issues, and Trump can point to historic numbers recorded during his presidency. Republicans can argue that a national change in attitude — away from defunding police, tolerating public drug use and treating enforcement as inherently suspect — vindicates their warnings about the excesses of progressive criminal-justice policy.
The contrast is especially useful when Republicans can point to Democratic leaders who are changing course. Lurie’s popularity suggests that even voters in San Francisco want order, accountability and functioning government. His success does not undermine the Republican argument so much as demonstrate how widely its basic premises have spread.
Republicans should resist claiming that Trump single-handedly produced the entire national decline. Voters can see that crime was already falling, and exaggerated claims would give opponents an easy rebuttal. A stronger argument is that Trump recognized the shift, reinforced it and made public safety a clear federal priority.
There is also a political paradox: As crime falls, voters may become less concerned about it. Republicans will have to connect improved statistics to everyday experience — safer transit, fewer carjackings, cleaner commercial districts and a greater willingness to intervene when addiction or mental illness becomes dangerous. Abstract percentages will not be enough.
Nor is continued progress guaranteed. Pandemic-era federal funding is expiring, police departments remain understaffed, and a small number of cities could reverse direction quickly. Crime statistics also cannot fully measure street disorder or the fear created by open-air drug markets.
Still, the direction is unmistakably encouraging. America has endured decades in which violent crime seemed like an intractable national defect. It is now approaching murder rates once thought unattainable.
The lesson is not that government finally discovered one perfect program. It is that cities began combining compassion with order, technology with human intelligence, and assistance with consequences. Trump’s law-and-order posture is part of that change. If the decline continues through Election Day, Republicans will have both an achievement to celebrate and a powerful argument to make: America became safer when it stopped treating public safety as something for which it needed to apologize.
(Contributing writer, Brooke Bell)