IdeaLog

Recent statistics destroy conservative arguments about crime

Posted on July 23, 2025

In the first half of 2025, crime plummeted across the United States. Over the past few years, there has been an extraordinary reduction in violent crime and homicide, especially in major cities. This trend proves that the conventional right-wing arguments about crime prevention are demonstrably false.

Let’s start with the latest nationwide data from Jeff Asher:

Crime almost certainly fell considerably in the United States in the first six months of 2025. The decline in crime that began in 2023 and picked up steam in 2024 has accelerated even faster so far in 2025. Both violent and property crime likely fell with large drops in both murder and motor vehicle theft leading the way.

The national decline in murder stands out due to extraordinary drops in many cities. New Orleans recorded fewer murders through June 2025 than any year since 1970 even in spite of the January 1st terrorist attack. New York City has only recorded fewer murders once through June since 1960 (136 in 2017). Philadelphia recorded the fewest murders since 1969, Los Angeles since 1966, Baltimore since 1965, Detroit since 1964, and San Francisco had the fewest ever recorded (monthly data available to 1960)…. [T]he US is on track to have the largest one-year drop in murder ever recorded for the third straight year in 2025.

As you know, this is entirely the opposite of the public narrative about crime. Year after year, Americans think that crime is going up. That’s because nobody publicizes it when crime goes down.

Donald Trump, for example, has complained over and over that crime is rising in the District of Columbia. But, in fact, violent crime in D.C. declined by 25 percent in the first half of 2025 compared to 2024 and violent crime plummeted by one-third from 2023 to 2024. The city’s crime rate is now lower than it has ever been since the 1960s!

So, what does that mean for crime prevention?

(1) Obviously, homicide and violent crime do not go down because of more police. Across the country, big city police departments have become smaller and smaller. We are having fewer crimes with fewer police.

(2) Stricter sentences do not lower the crime rate. Crime has substantially dropped without any real increase in sentences across the U.S.

(3) Special programs by local law enforcement don’t play a significant role in crime rates. There was a nationwide wave of crime, first rising after the beginning of COVID and then falling over the past few years, regardless of whether local police implemented one strategy or another. Sure, police and police strategies matter, but they don’t drive the crime rate.

The conventional political arguments over crime are simply wrongheaded.

Of course, It is easier to write about what is happening with crime than why it is happening. Let’s admit that we just don’t know for sure and there is extremely little real evidence of cause-and-effect.

We do know that murder and aggravated assault (the biggest category of violent crimes) are overwhelmingly emotional, not logical, acts. As Jens Ludwig demonstrates in the recent book Unforgiving Places, about 75 or 80 percent of these kinds of crimes are not planned. Reality is totally different from murder mysteries and crime shows.

It seems reasonable to guess that the closings and restrictions that came with COVID increased perpetrators’ psychological and mental health problems—they had fewer things to do and reduced access to health care and social welfare programs. Those may have been the major factors that caused murder and, to a lesser extent, violent crime to rise. And the end of COVID had the opposite effect. But, again, it’s just an informed guess.