The Quietest Crime Story of the Year

Violence fell across America in 2025 at historically unprecedented rates. Using homicide rankings in 25 major cities shows just how large—and how national—that decline really was.

Before I dive in this week, I wanted to thank Curing Crime for a deeply generous interview:

Beyond the Archives Dec 2025: Criminology Needs Better Answers

Like everything good in the world, Curing Crime is a bit hard to summarize, combining interviews, curating interesting media, and exploring history, psychology, and, of course, crime. Check it out.

It’s time to wrap up 2025 and take stock, and then peer over the windowsill and wonder at 2026. Meg Anderson succinctly synthesizes the year in crime on NPR’s Morning Edition and I thank her for including my thoughts

And what an extraordinary year it was, with declines in all types of crime at unprecedented rates across the country. To understand the magnitude of the decline, it is necessary only to invert the question: what would the coverage have been if these declines had instead been crime spikes? If, instead of crime, violence, and victimization spiraling to historically low levels, what if crime had peaked everywhere and all at once?

The reason for the silence is simply that you can’t trot someone in front of a camera and say, “This is John Roman. He would have been held at gunpoint on a warm summer’s evening in Penn’s Landing but for this year’s remarkable decline in violence. Because of that decline, his phone and wallet were not taken, and his sense of serenity was not shattered. Now back to the studio for another update on the Eagles.”

I’d like to tell the story of the 2025 decline in violence in two visuals. Since it began in late 2022, this crime decline has been driven primarily by a reduction in violence. While all types of crime declined in 2024 according to the FBI, violence is the best indicator of the scale of the decline.

I like city crime rankings as a way to tell this story. The idea is to present 25 of the largest cities in the US, examine their historical rankings by homicide rate per capita, and describe their current rankings. From this, we can ask what distinguishes cities that became relatively safer from those whose rankings declined? And how safe were those cities as a whole?

That’s a lot of information in a single graphic! It’s not Napoleon’s March on Russia, but I think it’s pretty interesting.

A couple of caveats. First, I don’t mean to imply here that crime and violence are unique to cities; I just think that, as an organizing scheme, it’s constructive. Also, I recognize that cities are not perfectly analogous. For example, the wealthier parts of St. Louis, where crime and violence are low, are incorporated into the county, not the city, whereas similar areas in other cities are within the city limits, so the comparison is not one-to-one. All very fair points. But onward nonetheless.

The data here comes from the FBI’s Uniform Crime Report. What I am calling 2024/2025 data is from Jeff Asher’s Real-Time Crime data and covers the most recent 12 months in his database, primarily from November 2024 through October 2025. I calculate per capita rates using the FBI population estimates as available, supplemented with Census data where necessary (though I note that the police reporting area may differ from Census city populations, and I extrapolated from available FBI data where FBI data were missing).

For changes in rankings, a city gets a green arrow if it improves more than two places in the rankings and a red arrow if it declines at least two spots. A black arrow signifies little change. The height of the graphic indicates the homicide rate, from 0 to 100 per 100,000.

On to the graphics.

Let’s start by comparing where US cities stood in 1990 before the Great American Crime Decline and in 2024/2025. 1990 marked the peak of violence in America. Washington, DC’s homicide rate was a ghastly 77.8 homicides per 100,000 residents in 1990. There were more than 2,200 homicides in NYC for a rate of 30.7 per 100,000, which only ranked 8^th worst out of 25.

How much better is violence in 2024/5 compared to 1990? If it had the same rate in 1990, the 2024/2025 highest-ranked big city (Detroit) would have just nudged LA for 10^th place.

There are many success stories in these data. New York City is the biggest of all, from one of the most violent cities in America (8^th), to one of the safest (20^th of 25).

This is consistent with a broader trend: seven of the 25 large cities improved by at least two spots in the rankings.

The flip side is those cities that went up the per capita homicide ranking. These six are Memphis, Milwaukee, Indianapolis, Columbus, Austin, and Phoenix. This change defies some stereotypes. While there are cities hollowed out by the loss of manufacturing, Austin and Phoenix are growing rapidly, as is Indianapolis. Recently, Columbus has been among the fastest-growing cities in the US. What also distinguished these cities was that homicide rates either remained stable or declined slightly, but not as rapidly as the US was improving.

Another way to investigate how cities are changing is to compare current homicide rates with those of 2020.

The 2020-2024/2025 story is quite different: there is little change in the rankings. There is a substantial decline in homicide: every city except Austin shows a per-capita decline. That’s 24 out of 25 cities, which is sufficient to claim that this is a national decline.

But merely stating that this is a national decline is insufficient to highlight how little change there has been over five highly tumultuous years. Just seven of 25 cities experienced a material change in ranking (measured as more than two spots up or down the list). Within the top ten cities with the highest per capita homicide rates, only Philadelphia shows a substantial change, moving from 5^th to 8^th.

What are we to make of this? What we have just experienced was uniquely national in nature. I don’t want to overwhelm you with images, but the Great American Crime Drop from 1990 to 2000 was also national in nature (again, 24 of 25 cities experienced a decline), but there was far more city-level mobility. The interim periods 2000-2010 and 2010-2020 show extreme city-level mobility.

This suggests that the recent decline in crime had little to do with local measures. National forces affected everything, everywhere, all at once. Any argument that focuses on incidents and interventions that were narrow in scope—either in time or in place—is unlikely to withstand long-term scrutiny.

Will this be repeated in 2026? I highly doubt it. But that’s the subject for another time.

Musical Interlude – Holiday Edition

As I’ve mentioned here, I lost my mom about a year ago, and it echoes. I’ve gotten a lot of questions over the year about Mom and how we grew up, leading me to think about all sorts of things I had forgotten. For instance, when people ask me about religion, I have to laugh because I suppose we have a broad perspective. My father had some poor experiences in Catholic school, which he still complains about from time to time. My wife’s family is Greek Orthodox. Iconography in our home includes those traditions, plus a Buddha on our front step and a Tree of Life in our den. But the strongest hands raising me were Mom and Grandmom.

While the Unitarian church was their home base, Mom and Grandmom did a lot of church shopping, gently exploring the Mainline Protestant trail in the DC suburbs over the decades. What they were looking for was the best music. Do other people do this? Church, to me, is the land of convention and tradition, an unwavering commitment to an unalterable liturgy. The curiosity inherent in church shopping seems at odds with the foundational idea of permanence. Thus, I suppose Church shopping is a form of loving protest. And on they went.

Sometimes, when they hit on just the right composition of celebration, requiem, and elegy, Mom and Grandmom brought me along.

A few weeks ago, I was listening to NPR and a segment on people’s favorite piece of music. As you can imagine, it was wildly eclectic, but in a very hushed NPR way. A centuries-old hymn pulled me into a CVS parking spot. For two minutes, I was squished again between my mom and grandmom, smelling their rich perfume, feeling their warmth, and listening to their song. This is the sound of their church. I hope your holidays are full of joy and whimsy.