Why I Think Murder Is Plunging
It's complicated, but this is what I find compelling.
Murder rose at the fastest rate ever recorded in 2020 and largely stayed at that elevated level in 2021 and 2022. Since then, however, murder has been falling at the fastest rate ever recorded.
It fell 12 percent in 2023 according to data from the FBI and it likely fell even faster in 2024 according to a variety of sources. Murder was down 14.6 percent in a sample of more than 400 cities and counties in the Real-Time Crime Index (RTCI), shootings fell 13 percent in the Gun Violence Archive, and homicides were down around 12 percent through last October according to preliminary data from the Center for Disease Control’s WONDER database.
The early data for 2025 is even more encouraging.
Data from the RTCI points to a double-digit percentage point drop in every category of crime through March 2025 including a 20+ percent decline in murder, and shootings are down 17 percent in the Gun Violence Archive through May. All told, murder is falling a lot in 26 of the country’s 30 most murderous cities so far in 2025. Detroit, New Orleans, Los Angeles, Philadelphia, and Baltimore each reported fewer murders through May than any year since the 1960s, and New York City reported the fewest murders ever reported through May 2025.
There are undoubtedly many factors contributing to the multi-year decline in crime we are experiencing, and it will be a while before the impact of these factors in reducing crime is truly understood. The complexity of these factors means that the ideas I’m espousing here may only explain a small portion of the decline and I wouldn’t discount other factors — like the ones Charles Lehman recently laid out — as contributing as well. I'm a smart enough analyst to know that my preferred explanation is not the only explanation.
Nobody knows for sure exactly why murder is falling so fast right now, a fact that is important to remember when reading this analysis as well as any other on the topic. Any explanation of why murder is falling at a historic clip must contend with several known facts:
The decline began in 2023 and has been remarkably steady, so the roots of the decline are probably things that happened in 2021, 2022 and 2023 rather things that started in 2024 or 2025.
There are fewer police officers in most big and medium-sized cities now than there were 2 or 3 years ago (and way fewer compared to pre-COVID).
There are still tons and tons of guns in the United States.
The decline is national in scale. Most (but not all) cities are moving in the same direction, so it's probably not caused by that one unique local program your city launched last year or by a poorly defined idea like ‘hard work’.
Clearance rates have improved since 2020 but are still really low by historical standards. The national murder clearance rate in 2023 (57.8 percent) was the third lowest ever recorded (behind 2020 and 2022) and the violent crime clearance rate in cities was essentially unchanged in 2023 compared to 2020 (39.9 percent vs 39.5 percent respectively).
And, finally, the big, structural root causes of gun violence are largely unchanged.
It is also helpful to acknowledge that the factors driving murder down now are almost certainly not the same factors that drove murder up in 2020 (that’s a discussion for another day).
With all of those caveats in mind, when I think about the main factors behind declining murder, a strong investment in communities from private and public sources after the shock of the pandemic stands out as a major cause. There is a wide array of types of support that I would put into the “community investment” basket, including jobs, infrastructure, and programming, but it could be summed up as “we spent a lot of money everywhere on stuff.”
Overall, this is the explanation that I find most satisfying in light of the preconditions discussed above. And I’m not alone in this line of thinking.
John Roman has argued that local government returning to normal was essential for enabling government services to assist citizens. Roman also points to research showing a clear causal effect between nonprofit organizations working in communities and decreasing crime.
The government’s inability to support communities like normal in 2020 and 2021 may have deepened and prolonged the surge in violence that began in mid-2020 for completely different reasons. By contrast, increased government support could have helped interrupt those cycles of violence, created jobs, and even potentially enabled more efficient policing despite less staffing at agencies.
All of this support was disrupted due to the pandemic when we needed it and it all came roaring back (and then some) in the last few years during the Great Murder Decline.
It’s difficult to measure the exact role that increased levels of community investment may have had in reducing violence in the United States. It’s easier to conceptualize how it could be a major factor though. I couldn’t help but think about the potential role these investments may have played while reading Jens Ludwig’s excellent new book. Ludwig writes (emphasis mine):
“For starters, we have RCTs (Randomized Controlled Trials) of policies that try to strengthen social control in communities. These policies try to get more eyes on the streets by cleaning up vacant lots, fixing up abandoned buildings, improving street lighting, opening more stores, or even hiring private unarmed security guards. Conventional wisdom predicts these policies shouldn’t really matter much for gun violence; few of them have anything to do with increasing the chances (or severity) of punishment, and none of them is about ending big, structural root causes like poverty or segregation or social isolation. Yet these different aspects of social control are all still situational factors in their own right as well — they’re just easier to change than things like poverty and segregation. While conventional wisdom claims these policies shouldn’t matter, the RCTs show that each of these policies can help prevent violence from happening in the first place.”
It is very easy to see evidence for increased investment in communities in a host of data sources. Employment in local and state government plunged during COVID, but employment picked up considerable steam between 2022 and 2024.
Local and state government tax receipts also increased 33 percent between the end of 2019 and the end of 2024 highlighting that communities had more funding available to do stuff with. And retail sales grew at a much faster rate after the shock of COVID compared to before.
Communities didn’t just hire more people and have more money to spend, they put those things together to fix roads and build new facilities aimed at supporting their populations and increasing public safety. Local and state government construction on highways increased by nearly 20 percent after COVID, by 49 percent on policing and public safety, by nearly 70 percent on lighting, and by more than 80 percent on neighborhood and social centers according to inflation-adjusted data from the Department of Transportation.
Finally, the Department of Justice’s main grant making arm – the Office of Justice Programs (OJP) increased grant funds allocated from 3.26 billion dollars in FY 2021 to 4.5 billion dollars in FY 2023 (Note: these numbers have been updated, see below footnote for details)1. These were targeted programs aimed specifically at reducing violence, increasing analytic capacity, and improving public safety overall.
The historic decline in murder should be expected to flatten out eventually, so seeing steps back from the community investments that potentially helped fuel murder’s drop is worrisome.
The future of government spending is uncertain to say the least and government employment at the state and federal level is either flatlining or falling. Construction spending on public safety and highways began to plateau in 2024 after huge increases since 2022. And a decline in OJP grantmaking in 2024 was followed by DOJ canceling around $500 million dollars from more than 370 grants – primarily from OJP — per an excellent analysis from the Council on Criminal Justice.
These grants covered community violence interruption programs, technical assistance to law enforcement through Project Safe Neighborhoods, a program designed to reduce rural violent crime and support rural law enforcement called the Rural Violent Crime Reduction Initiative, and much more across 37 states. Needless to say, the grant cancellations run the risk of exacerbating gun violence nationwide.
The decline that began in 2023 will end at some point. Nobody can say whether that will be in 6 months or 6 years, but the decline will most likely either level off or reverse at some point down the line just as it always does.
Crime trends tend to change slowly for complex reasons, so declining government spending and support is unlikely to be singularly responsible for crime suddenly rising nationwide. The factors that caused the Great Murder Decline (gonna make that a thing) will probably not be the same factors that cause things to go up when they inevitably do. But crime is dropping at an enormously fast rate, and if/when those trends start to turn around though then many of the tools that likely helped arrest and then reverse the increase last time may not be available.
As a long time retired Social Worker and Investigator I think the reason for Murder Rate plunging might be due to the following 1) Gangs appeal has lost its appeal 2) more knowledge about how to reach hard core damaged teens in the area of trauma 3) cameras all over the place . It seems that the kids today who grew with Technology recognizes that Big Brother is always around. My thoughts are not based on analysis but a lifetime growing up and working around crime .
I would to thank Jeff Archer for putting analysis back into the crime reporting. Unfortunately most folks still think crime is forever growing making us permanently hypervigliant.
Hi Jeff, there are endless examples of governments and private entities investing millions of dollars in high-crime communities (e.g., Baltimore's Sandtown) without achieving results.
"This Article is built around a central empirical claim: most reforms and interventions in the criminal legal space are shown to have little lasting impact when evaluated with gold-standard methods of causal inference.” See https://www.crimeinamerica.net/does-anything-work-to-reduce-crime/.
There are multiple examples in the cited article as to a social programs approach not having an impact.
"When it comes to the type of limited-scope interventions evaluable via RCT and other quasi-experimental methods, the engineer’s view appears to be mostly a myth. More than fifty years of RCT evidence shows the limits in our ability to engineer change with this type of intervention (emphasis added).”
The essence of her argument is that it’s tough to engineer social change through programs.
As you are aware, it's difficult to impossible to explain a decrease in homicides, a stance taken by most criminologists after the 20 year decline. Lead paint? Average age? Police endeavors? Some are suggesting that fentanyl deaths have led to a vast decrease in overdoses, and crime.
Explaining crime is the wild west of sociology.
Best, Len.