Some good news you may have missed: The murder rate is plummeting. After a bloody three-year surge, there were fewer than five murders for every 100,000 Americans last year, crime analyst Jeff Asher has estimated, a 14 percent decrease from 2023. And though the year is still young, Asher has collected data from hundreds of major cities suggesting that 2025 could see the lowest murder rate on record.
The trend hasn’t received as much coverage as it deserves. And what reporting there has been on the issue, though uniformly relieved, has tended to avoid explaining the phenomenon. One Vox analysis, for example, gestures vaguely at the waning pandemic (which apparently wasn’t over in 2023). The Economist says, nonspecifically, that “explanations abound,” pointing at the dropping price of fentanyl, among sundry other factors.
Deliberately or not, accounts of the tumbling murder rate are ignoring the elephant in the room: Murder spiked in 2020 because of anti-cop protests, which drove down police activity, and it’s declined since, because big-city leaders started using the criminal justice system again. It’s really that simple. The only real question isn’t why violence fell. It’s whether we will make the same mistake again.
