Violent Crime Rates Fell Again in 2024 and Are Likely To Keep Dropping in 2025
This is great news, but it also undercuts Donald Trump's claim that violent crime was out of control before he returned to office.
This week, the FBI reported its crime statistics for 2024. It was cause for celebration—unless you're a member of the Trump administration trying to claim credit.
"National violent crime decreased an estimated 4.5% in 2024 compared to 2023 estimates," the bureau reported. Murder rates declined by 14.9 percent, aggravated assault by 3 percent, and robbery by 8.9 percent. Starting in 2013, the FBI adopted a new, more expansive method of classifying rape; in 2024, the number of offenses in the revised rape category declined by 5.2 percent.
"Overall violent crime…fell 4.4 percent in 2024 with the nation's violent crime rate reaching 359.1 per 100,000. That's the lowest national violent crime rate recorded since 1969," crime data analyst Jeff Asher wrote on Substack.
Earlier this year, preliminary data indicated a considerable drop in crime last year and that 2025 might continue that trend. On that measure, there is even more good news.
"The 2024 data adds confidence that 2025 will feature the lowest murder rate ever recorded," Asher added. "A decline of around 10 percent in 2025 would place this year even with 2014 as the lowest murder rate ever recorded. Any larger decline in 2025 would give this year the 'record.'"
This is a wonderful sign: One of the great mysteries of the last few decades is the relatively consistent decline in violent crime starting in the early 1990s. Some years did see spikes—most notably a big jump in 2020—but thankfully, those seem to be outliers and not indicators that the trend was reversing.
Of course, this contradicts the message coming from President Donald Trump and members of his administration.
At the Republican National Convention in July 2024, speaker after speaker warned of the danger Americans face from unchecked criminals. They cautioned that increased migration across the southern border put America at risk—even though crime rates were down in the cities that took in the most migrants.
Last month, when a report indicated crime was down in several major cities, the Trump administration claimed its aggressive immigration raids were the reason—an abrupt about-face from the previous year, when Joe Biden was president and Trump falsely claimed "homicides are skyrocketing" and "crime in this country is through the roof."
"Now that those numbers are politically useful, the Trump administration and its allies would like to take a very early victory lap," Reason's C.J. Ciaramella wrote. "But 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."
The FBI numbers from this week show the 2025 drop in crime is directly consistent with the precipitous drop in 2024—which was itself consistent with 2023, when homicide rates fell 11.6 percent. The idea that lower crime rates in 2024 are a result of anything Trump has done since reentering office in January is ridiculous.
Of course, it's possible that some of the people swept up in Trump's big, showy immigration raids were violent criminals taken off the street just in time. It's also possible the administration is over-indexing for violent offenders by targeting gang members. But either scenario seems unlikely based on the facts at hand.
According to the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse, the government "held 56,945 [people] in ICE [Immigration and Customs Enforcement] detention according to data current as of July 27, 2025," and of that total, 71 percent "have no criminal conviction."
"New data obtained from ICE by the Deportation Data Project drives home how frequently Latino immigrants are arrested off the streets without any recent prior contact with law enforcement," writes David J. Bier, director of immigration studies at the Cato Institute. "One in five ICE arrests is a Latin American on the streets without a criminal history or a removal order."
This squares with the administration's stated objectives. In May, White House advisor Stephen Miller reportedly berated ICE officers for prioritizing violent offenders instead of just casting a wide net by rounding up Latinos at Home Depot and 7-Eleven locations.
Tom Homan, Trump's border czar, told Fox News in July that ICE and border patrol agents "don't need probable cause to walk up to somebody, briefly detain them, and question them….They just go through the observations, get articulable facts, based on their location, their occupation, their physical appearance, their actions."
The FBI data this week is great news, indicative that violent crime is continuing to trend down after a brief uptick in 2020. There is reason to celebrate that fact, but there's no reason to think Trump's policies had much to do with it.
