US homicide rate heading to new historic low. Experts are not sure why
Crime rates across major U.S. cities have plummeted in 2026, with homicides on track to hit their lowest level since record-keeping began in 1900, according to a report released Thursday by the independent Council on Criminal Justice.
Researchers told Straight Arrow there is no single explanation — or consensus — for why crime is falling so dramatically. Notably, crime rates dropped across the country, regardless of location, population size or local politics.
“It was a good surprise,” Ernesto Lopez, the report’s co-author, told Straight Arrow.
Falling crime rates
The homicide rate in 30 large U.S. cities was 18% lower in the first half of 2026 than in the same period a year earlier and 51% below its peak in the first half of 2022, according to the report.
When the FBI releases its final numbers, the authors wrote, the data will likely show that U.S. homicide rates reached historic lows in 2025 and fell further in 2026.
The decline extends beyond homicide. Nine of the 13 violent, property and drug crimes tracked by the council declined during the first six months of the year. Carjackings fell 47%, robberies dropped 17% and motor vehicle thefts decreased 20% from the same period a year earlier, the report found.
However, there were notable exceptions. Incidents of domestic violence, sexual assaults and drug offenses rose in the first half of 2026 compared with the prior year.
No single explanation
Criminologists who spoke with Straight Arrow pointed to a variety of factors that could be driving down crime rates.
“Crime is declining in every category, in urban, suburban, and rural areas, in red and blue states,” said John Roman, a senior fellow at NORC at the University of Chicago.
Roman told Straight Arrow that the breadth of the decline indicates that falling rates cannot be attributed to any “particular police or other justice system policy or program” at the state or local level.
Instead, Roman said the forces driving the decline appear to be national. Possible factors include the end of the COVID-19 pandemic and a return to normalcy, reduced demand for drugs and substantial federal aid to state and local governments through legislation such as the American Rescue Plan Act, signed by former President Joe Biden in March 2021.
Alex Piquero, a University of Miami criminology professor and former director of the federal Bureau of Justice Statistics, described a “perfect storm of factors” that began around 2022. He credited “a return to evidence-based prevention and intervention strategies” and billions of dollars in federal investments, including funds provided by the bipartisan Safer Communities Act signed in 2022.
Crime is a social problem, said Lopez, and so “there’s really no one thing that drives it.” Demographic changes and young people spending more time home alone may also be contributing to falling crime rates, Lopez told Straight Arrow.
Like Roman, Lopez said the trends are nationwide and surprisingly consistent.
“Almost all major cities in the U.S., regardless of political representation, have seen major declines the last several years.”
Can Trump take credit?
Trump and his allies have attributed favorable crime data, including the plunging U.S. murder rate, to the administration’s law-and-order agenda.
Experts noted that while crime has fallen substantially since Trump returned to office in January 2025, the current decline began during the second half of 2022 and accelerated in 2023 and 2024.
“The crime drops started to occur before the current administration’s policies came into effect,” Piquero said. The administration’s efforts have been concentrated in a small number of cities, he added, where crime was already falling.
Whether Trump’s policies have accelerated the decline remains an open question, Piquero said.
The Trump administration has advanced its crime agenda through expanded federal-local enforcement operations, tougher prosecution of violent offenders and gangs, increased immigration enforcement and targeted surges of federal agents in select cities.
Last month, the Justice Department announced nearly $700 million in grants for law enforcement across the country, and nearly $300 million for its Model Cities Initiative, which will direct concentrated federal support to two to four cities.
At the same time, the administration has dismantled or reduced programs that some experts believe helped reduce the crime rate. For example, last year the Justice Department terminated hundreds of grants that impact public safety and victim services, including $158 million in community violence intervention grants, according to Reuters.
The Trump administration has also made deep personnel cuts across law enforcement agencies, including the Justice Department, which reduced its staff by 9,495 people, or 8.1%, from Jan. 20, 2025, through May 2026, according to the Office of Personnel Management’s Federal Workforce Database.
Thomas Abt, founding director of the University of Maryland’s Violence Reduction Center, said “federally supported anti-crime approaches that supported both cops and communities and encouraged them to work together” helped lower crime.
Abt told Straight Arrow that the administration’s rejection of such strategies “could lead to more fear, mistrust, and crime down the line.”
Will crime rates keep falling?
Experts told Straight Arrow the downward trend could continue.
“I think of crime as a series of consecutive epidemics,” said Jeffrey Fagan, a criminal law professor at Columbia Law School. Right now, he told Straight Arrow, “there is no ‘virus’ like a drug epidemic.”
Taking the long view, Fagan said the county is experiencing a 30-year “epochal crime drop.”
Piquero also struck a hopeful tone.
“While any decreases moving forward may not be as large as we have seen over the past few years,” he said, “I see nothing on the horizon, absent some event that no one can foresee, that would alter these trends.”
But “this is not a time to be complacent,” Piquero warned, “when it comes to crime prevention and intervention.”
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Ella Rae Greene, Editor In Chief
