Despite a flurry of politically charged violence and a number of Islamic and left-wing motivated terror attacks, 2025 also experienced the largest single-year decline in homicides in US history. The plunge brings official US homicide rates to near-record lows.
Based on a sampling of preliminary crime statistics from 550 U.S. law enforcement agencies, the year is expected to end with a roughly 20% decrease in homicides nationwide, Jeff Asher, a national crime analyst, told ABC News.
“So, even taking a conservative view, let’s say its 17% or 16%, you’re still looking at the largest one-year drop ever recorded in 2025,” said Asher, co-founder of AH Datalytics and a former crime analyst for the CIA and the New Orleans Police Department.
The drop comes after what many law enforcement analysts call the “Pandemic Surge”, the Biden era explosion in homicides and overall crime was considered endemic to Democrat controlled cities across the US. Though, Democrat leaders claimed throughout Biden’s term that no such surge was taking place.
The spike in murders was the largest since the early 1990s at the height of the gang violence era. However, criminal data collection was incomplete during the Biden years due to a sudden change in the FBI’s Summary Reporting System (SRS). Starting in 2021, the FBI began transitioning to a new method called the National Incident-Based Reporting System (NIBRS).
This transition was officially slated to take up to five years to complete and during the changeover a large percentage of US cities were not required to submit complete crime stats. Meaning, as bad as the pandemic surge was, the real crime rate was likely much higher than reported.
By the end of 2024, crime data coverage returned to around 95% of the population. This is rather convenient for Democrats given they had a convenient excuse to suppress true crime rates through lack of reporting; then, the reporting system went back to normal as soon as Donald Trump returned to office.
If the stats are accurate for 2025, this means the Trump Administration has overseen the largest ever drop in homicides in the US in it’s first year without the benefit of incomplete FBI data. This is impressive.
But there as some lingering concerns about the accuracy of blue city crime rates. For example, Washington DC officials have been caught in the midst of active suppression of crime data, using intimidation of precinct commanders as a means to rig arrest records and downgrade offenses while progressive prosecutors and judges keep conviction rates low.
The exposure of this fraud (due to law enforcement whistleblowers) led to the resignation of D.C. Police Chief Pamela Smith and an ongoing congressional investigation.
The question is, how many other blue cities are involved in the same kind of crime stat suppression and is this the real cause of the drop in criminal activity. Or, did Trump play a substantial role in cutting down homicides? Perhaps the mass deportations along with National Guard deployments in place like DC and LA have had a meaningful effect on urban violence.
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