Not everything on this site points the wrong way. After a sharp rise during the pandemic, the U.S. murder rate fell at a record pace: 2023 and 2024 together were the largest two-year drop the FBI has ever recorded, and the FBI's 2025 report shows a further 18.1% drop, to 4.1 per 100,000, which the report ties with 1955 and 1956 for the lowest rate in records going back to 1900. It is one of the clearest good-news trends in this dataset, and it belongs to no party. The fall began in 2022 and has run continuously through the Biden years and into the current term. On this chart, lower is better.
U.S. murder rate, murders per 100,000 people, 2005–2025. ↓ Lower is safer.
Why the murder rate, and why it isn't a trophy
Of all crime numbers, murder is the most trustworthy: a body is almost always found and counted, so the figure barely moves with how willing people are to report crime or how many police departments file paperwork. That makes it the cleanest single read on violence: cleaner than the overall violent-crime rate, which is noisier and sensitive to definitional changes. And the decline is real by any measure: the FBI recorded a roughly 12% murder drop in 2023 a further ~15% in 2024, and another 18.1% in 2025. Two independent samples, a real-time index of hundreds of agencies and a survey of large cities, had pointed to a fall near 20% before the official figure arrived. But the honest footnote is that no president can credibly claim it. Criminologists tie the pandemic spike and its reversal to disruptions and then recoveries in policing, social services, and daily life: forces that move slowly and cross administrations. This is a national tide, not a policy trophy.
Two data caveats, and one attribution caveat. First, the 2025 point is official but not a full count: the FBI published it on August 14, 2026, from data that more than 17,000 agencies (over 87% of those in its program) reported voluntarily, so the national rate is an estimate. Second, 2021 is the weakest year in the FBI series: the bureau switched reporting systems that year and major departments (including New York and Los Angeles) didn't report, so national estimates lean heavily on modeling; the CDC's death-certificate data, which has no reporting gap, puts the true peak a year later. The two instruments (FBI crimes-reported vs. CDC deaths) run at slightly different levels and shouldn't be mixed on one axis. Third: this decline spans the Biden–Trump II handover and is national in scope: the primary data does not support crediting it to either administration.