The U.S. Is on Track for Its Lowest Murder Rate Ever

I’ve been pretty public about my admiration for crime analyst Jeff Asher and his Real-Time Crime Index, a tool that lets you take a deep dive into all kinds of crime data. So when Jeff wrote recently that the U.S. was on track for the lowest murder rate ever, I took notice.

I reached out to Jeff with a few questions about what he is seeing in the numbers.

Our exchange has been lightly edited for length.

We know that murder is falling fast and that it’s almost certainly well below pre-COVID levels. That’s clear in the FBI data, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention data, Gun Violence Archive data, and in my project – the Real-Time Crime Index (RTCI).

The RTCI takes a sample of data from several hundred cities to evaluate national crime trends as they occur. According to the most recent RTCI sample of 562 agencies covering 116 million people, murder is down 20% through July this year compared to 2024. Doing back-of-the-napkin math of a 15-20% drop in 2025 on top of the FBI’s estimated murder rate for 2024 points to a strong likelihood of the lowest murder rate ever recorded this year (data back to 1960).

No! Criminologists also don’t “know” why crime fell so severely in the 1990s. It’s a major accomplishment that we can actually measure changing crime trends as they occur, but explaining them is a whole other challenge. Any explanation must account for at least five factors:

In my opinion, the main driver is that an enormous investment from the federal government in the years after the pandemic enabled a vast array of new efforts that have had an enormous effect. This includes a massive increase in local government hiring in the wake of the pandemic that allowed for government programming and services to be restored, huge increases in local/state government construction on streets and street lighting, neighborhood and social centers, and public safety infrastructure – all of which had direct and indirect impacts on crime. And there was a very big increase in Department of Justice spending from the Office of Justice Programs.

All crime is falling. The FBI measures seven major categories of crime in 11 population groups ranging from rural counties to cities of 1 million or more, and crime was down in every category across every population group in 2024. Data from the RTCI for 2025 shows even larger decreases in both violent and property crime this year – greater than 10% in each category. Overall, the 2025 violent crime rate will likely be the lowest reported by the FBI since 1968, and the property crime rate will likely be the lowest ever reported by the FBI.

Not every agency reports data to the FBI every year, so they have to estimate the usually small amount of missing data (typically about 5% of the country). In recent years, the revisions have gotten larger, and it’s not exactly clear why. Murder in 2023, for example, went from roughly down 11% to down roughly 9.5% when the numbers were revised in the 2024 data release. That can be frustrating for data nerds like me, but it doesn’t really impact the bottom line about crime in the United States.

One good workaround to this problem is to rely less on the FBI estimates and use other sources when thinking about U.S. crime trends. RTCI is a good independent source, there’s official CDC homicide data, and the Gun Violence Archive has reporting on shooting trends that people can rely on.