Some notable new commentary on the apparent great crime decline of 2025
I have done a couple of 2025 posts (here and here and linked below) drawing on big city “real time” homicide data from police departments to make the case that a remarkable decline in murders seems to be unfolding in many large urban areas through the first part of 2025. As I caution in those posts, these data may not be complete, may not be representative of the who nation, and may not represent trends that will persist through 2025. Still, the numbers seemed so positive, especially in the wake of what seemed ot be positive crime trends in 2024 and 2023, I have a hard time not speculating that we may be in the middle of a (post-COVID spike) great crime decline.
Because I have seen relatively little discussion of these data and trends (as well as relatively little bragging from elected officials), I have been wondering if I am missing something. But in recent days, a couple of notable crime analysts have these new substack postings on the topic:
From Jeff Asher at Jeff-alytics, “Crime Is Likely Down An Enormous Amount So Far In 2025.” A concluding snippet:
The crime trends through the first few months of 2025 are incredibly encouraging and backed up by the RTCI, aggregated data from individual cities, shooting data from individual cities, and the Gun Violence Archive.
In some respects, these findings aren’t all that surprising. Murder almost certainly fell at historic rates in 2023 and 2024, auto theft dropped a ton in 2024 after surging for four straight years, and other kinds of crime were declining in 2024. Crime trends tend to change for complicated reasons and rapid deviations (like with murder in 2020 or auto thefts in 2022) are relatively rare. Crime trends are normally like a large ship in that they take quite a while to turn around.
But these are not normal times. Huge amounts of uncertainty — economic, political, societal — could conceivably lead to large changes in America in the coming months.
All we can say with certainty is that major crime — as counted by the FBI — almost certainly declined quite a lot in the first quarter of 2025. These would be record levels of decline for most crime types if they held up for the full year. Will this trend persist for the remaining 8+ months of the year? Only time will tell.
From John Roman at External Processing, “Why has crime declined? Part Deux.” A snippet:
My take has been, and remains, that when cities are considered individually, they’re special, but not unique. Each city needs solutions that are tailored to its problems. But the problems are likely to be pretty universal, and the trends pretty universal as well. Almost every place in America experienced a spike in violence during the COVID period, and almost every place has seen that tide recede, and often substantially.
And almost every place would benefit from adopting evidence-based prevention and intervention strategies. Again, these need to be tailored to the local context, but on average, there is no need for each city to develop its own evidence of what strategies are effective and which are not. The devil is in the details for sure, but most places would benefit from figuring out how to implement approaches we already know are generally effective rather than rolling out something new and unique.
That is also a long-winded way of saying that while we do not know specifically why crime is declining, we do see it everywhere, and that is an important starting point for the investigation. Yes, there is a tremendous amount of variation across cities, but it is variation around a broad trend, not a trend of its own.
Prior recent related posts: