“”What’s interesting about crime in DC is that there’s three very distinct problems,” writes Reason’s Robby Soave, who lives there. “One is semi-professional gang crime, mostly confined to sketchy neighborhoods, that usually targets other gang members. This is the kind of crime every large city has, and is counteracted by spending more money on homicide detectives and then aggressively prosecuting illegal firearms violators.”
“Then there’s mentally ill and drug addicted homeless people setting up tent cities,” he continues, noting that the most egregiously large and disorderly encampments were cleaned up. “Lastly, there are large groups of teenagers rampaging through otherwise fairly nice and affluent areas, assaulting people and stealing cars, and also getting into fights with each other. Seems to be driven by a mix of post-pandemic societal collapse, trends in youth behavior, and insufficient action by authorities. It’s here where a more robust police presence might do the most good.” It’s this third group that news reports are mostly fixating on, the group responsible for the Big Balls assault and that has caught Trump’s attention.”
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Crime is down, and, “though the decrease is laudable, this is in part because crime and disorder were rampant during the pandemic. It has taken years for it to come down to seminormal rates, and those “normal rates” aren’t even that good: “The murder rate at the end of 2024 was, per Asher’s data, lower than 2023, but still about 70 percent higher than that of a decade prior. And although carjackings are down, they’re still elevated over pre-2020.” But lots of crime data is unfortunately easy to manipulate, and novel approaches by new entrants—young people engaged in serious property crime and assaults in previously safe areas—are surely worth stamping out as they emerge.
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a ton of D.C.’s criminal justice system is already under the federal government’s control, and the feds are doing a rather poor job managing it. “That starts with the US attorney’s office, which, unlike a normal federal prosecutor’s office, also does the job of a district attorney and prosecutes local crimes. More significantly, the basic local trial court—the DC Superior Court—is technically a federal court whose members need to be confirmed by the Senate. Senate majority leaders, understandably, are normally not that fired up about local trial courts in DC, and they don’t like to spend floor time on these confirmations.” A high vacancy rate (roughly 20 percent) is the result, which means people in need of punishment don’t receive it so swiftly.
The federal government also handles pretrial supervision for people who’ve been arrested and are awaiting full court proceedings, adds Yglesias, but the agencies handling this can’t seem to figure out how to do their damn jobs: The Court Services and Offender Supervision Agency, in 2023, “had 2,120 offenders on ‘maximum supervision level’ but only 490 outfitted with GPS monitors,” for example, per Politico. And when a pretrial release of a man accused of shooting 26 rounds from an AR-15 at a car made the rounds on the news, the Pretrial Services Agency came under intense scrutiny, with prosecutors writing in a legal filing that “while GPS monitoring by the vendor may be in real time, PSA’s monitoring of defendants is not. PSA only works during normal business hours. Therefore, PSA only finds out about violations that occur at night or on weekends after the fact.” (When would you guess that the majority of violations occur?)
Trump, of course, is not focused on the unsexy work detailed above, which could meaningfully impact which criminals get locked up and how quickly, who gets leniency and who gets surveilled and confined.”
“A new report by the Council on Criminal Justice (CCJ) found that homicides are significantly down in major cities across the country compared to last year, and the Trump administration is claiming its mass deportation program is part of the reason.
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First, one must begin by congratulating the Trump administration on its sudden, enthusiastic embrace of crime statistics. Trump and his reelection campaign repeatedly claimed in 2024 that crime was spiking even though it had been generally dropping since 2022.
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“there were issues with the FBI crime data, which were eventually revised, but the data generally jibed with what other public safety researchers were reporting: that crime in 2024 was continuing to go down.
Now that those numbers are politically useful, the Trump administration and its allies would like to take a very early victory lap.
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there is no evidence yet of any deterrent effect, or that crime is falling now because of the administration’s mass deportation program, rather than for whatever reason it was falling in the past. Quantifying the effects of laws and law enforcement—and attempting to attribute causation to dips and spikes in crime—is a notoriously tricky problem in criminal justice research, and it usually takes years to collect and analyze the data.
On its face, the claim that Trump’s immigration enforcement is driving down crime runs into the problem that most of the immigrants being arrested aren’t criminals. About 60 percent of people arrested by ICE between January and June had no criminal record. In fact, the Trump administration’s quotas for arrests and deportations have forced ICE and DHS to stop prioritizing investigations of criminal networks and serious offenders.
There may well be an incapacitative effect on crime from the scale of the Trump administration’s mass deportations, but even then, it would likely be statistically minor. Most studies that have attempted to quantify how much the “mass incarceration” era contributed to the national drop in crime that began in the mid-’90s have pegged it somewhere between single digits and 25 percent. And that represented the largest buildup of prisons and prison populations in U.S. history.
Crime also fell during the Obama administration and the second half of the Biden administration, but no one suggested that Joe Biden’s executive order banning police chokeholds or Barack Obama’s lax marijuana enforcement were responsible for safer cities.”
“the murder rate in 2024 not just falling from the 2020 spike but returning to pre-COVID levels. That brings us to the present, and to a question: Could 2025 see the lowest murder rate ever recorded?”
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“Fewer people are being killed than they were during a major homicide increase” is not compelling messaging, to be sure. But that’s not what’s happening here. We’re not talking about a record decline after a precipitous surge; we’re talking about a record low, period. While it’s still possible that won’t pan out, the fact that it’s even on the table after a bloody few years is such good news that journalists might even consider leading with it.”
“there are two main reasons Americans tend to overestimate the extent to which crime happens: Media coverage of crime can often overstate trends and sometimes sensationalizes incidents that grab people’s attention. And law-and-order campaigns — the kind of campaigns that Trump ran, for example — are a mainstay of American politics and appear in virtually every election cycle in local, state, and national races.”
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“The United States is, after all, a relatively violent country and has a higher homicide rate than its peers. But while crime is a problem, lawmakers tend to react too quickly to crime trends, often by passing shortsighted tough-on-crime laws that bolster the perception of public safety by, say, putting more cops on the streets, but end up exacerbating the existing flaws of the criminal justice system, including sending poorer and more marginalized people to prison.”
“the Gallup trend shows that since 1993, as violent crime rates have steadily fallen, Americans’ perceptions have shifted based on their partisan affiliation and the occupant of the White House: In 2004, during President George W. Bush’s first term, the 53 percent of respondents who thought crime had risen included 39 percent of Republicans but 67 percent of Democrats. (FBI statistics for that year indicated that both violent and property crime each declined by just over 2 percent in that year.)
On the other hand, Americans in general just seem particularly bad at judging crime trends: In 2014, 63 percent of all respondents told Gallup that crime was up over the previous year, including 57 percent of Democrats and 72 percent of Republicans. Meanwhile, 2014 turned out to be the least violent year in decades.
But Americans’ views on crime and criminal justice, no matter how capricious and ill-informed they may seem, are extremely consequential. After all, while the president likely has very little direct influence on criminal justice trends in your local police precinct, voters have the power to elect prosecutors, who wield tremendous power in deciding who faces prison time and how punitive their sentences could be. And there is evidence that voters’ perceptions of crime affect what kind of prosecutor they’re likely to favor.
“The growth in incarceration rates in the United States over the past 40 years is historically unprecedented and internationally unique,” a 2014 study found. “Local elected officials—including state legislators who enacted sentencing policies and, in many places, judges and prosecutors who decided individual cases—were highly attuned to their constituents’ concerns about crime. Under these conditions, punishment policy moved in a more punitive direction.”
Prosecutors recognize this, as well. In a 2022 draft policy paper, Harvard Ph.D candidate Chika Okafor found that “being in a [district attorney] election year increases total admissions per capita to state prisons and total months sentenced per capita,” meaning that prosecutors are more likely to seek prison time and longer sentences for offenders during election years.”
“The new numbers indicate that the violent crime victimization rate fell slightly in 2023, although the change was not statistically significant. “Findings show that there was an overall decline in the rate of violent victimization over the last three decades, from
1993 to 2023,” BJS Acting Director Kevin M. Scott reports. “While the 2023 rate was higher than those in 2020 and 2021, it was not statistically different from the rate 5 years ago, in 2019.”
That observation is inconvenient for Trump, who wants to blame Harris for rising crime during the Biden administration. Leaving aside the plausibility of assuming that a president, let alone a vice president, has much influence on crime rates, Trump’s thesis relies on the assumption that violent crime is more common now than it was during his administration. But even according to the data source he prefers, the 2023 rate was statistically indistinguishable from the rate in 2019, his second-to-last year in office.”
“Violent crime levels have dropped significantly in the first half of the year, according to a new report from the Major Cities Chiefs Association.
Overall, violent crime dropped by 6 percent and homicides fell by 17 percent in 69 cities compared to the same period last year. Columbus, Ohio, saw the biggest drop in violent crime at 41 percent, according to an Axios data analysis. But cities including Miami, Washington, DC, and Austin, Texas, also saw large declines. Notably, New York City was not included in the data, though other reports have indicated that violent crime is falling there, too.
It’s hard to say exactly what’s causing the decline, which comes after a major Covid-19 crime wave. It may be partially due to policies aimed at tackling crime at the federal, state, and local levels. But it may also just be a symptom of the fact that normal life in America has resumed post-pandemic — or a combination of those and other factors.
Republicans have long tried to use concerns about crime as a political cudgel against President Joe Biden’s administration. While former President Donald Trump doesn’t appear to be giving up on that attack strategy just yet, Democrats can now use the new data as a defense. Whether that will be effective, however, is far from certain.”
“A few years out from the start of the pandemic, it does appear that the rise in homicides in the United States was unique. According to multiple studies and a systematic review of crime data for 2020, in most countries crime fell following Covid-19 lockdowns, then gradually returned to their pre-pandemic levels once the lockdown measures lifted. Homicide was the exception to the rule — but not the way it was in the United States.
Homicides around the world, according to the 46 studies the authors reviewed, didn’t change significantly due to the pandemic. “Most studies reported no relationship between Covid-19 and homicides,” the authors of the study wrote. A majority of the studies, they noted, found no relationship between the implementation or easing of lockdown measures and killings.
The Small Arms Survey, which gathers and analyzes data about firearms ownership and violence across the world, also found that the global rate of violent deaths decreased worldwide in 2020.
What was different in the United States?
“There was no other country that experienced this kind of sudden increase in gun violence,” says Patrick Sharkey, a sociologist at Princeton University who studies the intersections of urban segregation, economic inequality, and violence. It was gun violence, specifically, that sent violent crime soaring. Americans bought guns in record numbers during the pandemic, and according to an analysis by Rob Arthur and Asher for Vox, there’s evidence that more people were carrying guns in 2020 — even before crime soared that summer. “Guns don’t necessarily create violence on their own, but they make violence more lethal,” Sharkey says.
While experts caution that it’s difficult to definitively prove what caused the rise in violent crime, there are a few other factors that likely contributed to it.
One was the killing of George Floyd by police and the unrest surrounding it, accompanied by a withdrawal in policing that followed. Previous research has shown that high-profile incidents of police violence correspond with a pullback by police and a rise in crime — specifically, robberies and murders. Data following the unrest after Floyd’s killing in Minneapolis and elsewhere shows a marked decline in policing and arrests that summer.”
“despite those specific-sounding FBI numbers, we don’t really know the current crime rate. The feds recently changed the way they compile data, and reporting law-enforcement agencies have yet to catch up.
“In 2021, the FBI retired its nearly century-old national crime data collection program, the Summary Reporting System used by the Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR) program,” Weihua Li of The Marshall Project, which specializes in journalism about criminal-justice issues, reported earlier this year. “The agency switched to a new system, the National Incident-Based Reporting System (NIBRS), which gathers more specific information on each incident.”
“Unfortunately, despite the advantages of the newer National Incident Based Reporting System, many state and local law enforcement agencies have yet to make the switch,” the Brennan Center’s Ames Grawert and Noah Kim commented this month. “Law enforcement agencies covering just over half of the population reported a full year’s worth of data to the FBI in 2021. By comparison, the FBI’s recent reports have been based on data from agencies covering upwards of 95 percent of the population.”
“The gap includes the nation’s two largest cities by population, New York City and Los Angeles, as well as most agencies in five of the six most populous states: California, New York, Illinois, Pennsylvania, and Florida,” added Li.”
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“There are other sources of crime data aside from the FBI, point out the Brennan Center’s Grawert and Kim. But those sources, public and private, don’t entirely agree with each other. Some show increases in homicides and violent crime in 2021, though at a slower pace than in 2020; others show a decline. These sources also aren’t as well-known as the FBI data which, despite the flaws of the old methodology, gave us comparable information year after year.”
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“So, is crime getting better or worse? You can make an educated judgment about your own community. But on a larger scale, like most everything else right now, it will be a while before we sort out the mess.”