A Forecast for Less Violence in 2025

The crime decline is slowing and we will need to find new mechanisms for a further decline

Forecasting crime is a dicey business. The range of potential outcomes is vast because crime and violence are influenced by so many variables, including macro factors like the health of the economy, the political environment, the state of policing, and the criminal justice system.

There are scads of ways to forecast, but one promising technique is to look at how past trends are correlated since past trends were pulled by the same factors that influence current trends. If, for instance, two trends have typically moved together, but have been pulled apart in recent years, a reasonable forecast might predict that those two trends will start to move together again. That, I believe, is exactly the situation we find ourselves in today.

What I will try and demonstrate below is that robbery and homicide rates have historically trended along the same path. That long-term relationship began to change about 15 years ago but remained relatively predictable. COVID, however, completely disrupted that…