As the U.S. nears its 250th birthday, it's doing pretty well by at least one measure: the national murder rate.
"The United States almost certainly had the lowest murder rate ever recorded in 2025, with the FBI having data back to 1960," says crime data analyst Jeff Asher. "And the available evidence suggests that we're going to go even lower this year."
Asher published his prediction in late May, basing it in part on the early data he collects directly from about 600 police agencies for his site The Crime Index. That nationally representative sampling shows murders dropped 18.7% in the first four months of this year, compared to the same period last year. All violent crime dropped 6.4%.
An important caveat is that this would be the lowest murder rate on record — meaning since the FBI started publishing national murder numbers in the 1950s. There are some older records of national rates of homicide (a larger category than criminal murder) kept by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
"They [the CDC] have good homicide data back to 1930 or so, and there's a few years in the 1950s that were slightly lower than 2025," Asher says. "But if you put another big drop on top of that, then you're talking about this year potentially being the lowest homicide rate ever recorded, too."
If there's another "big drop" in violence this summer, it will be especially striking in light of where things stood just a few years ago. The Crime Index shows the national murder rate spiking to 6.8 deaths per 100,000 in 2021— a 54% increase over the previous low of 4.4 deaths per 100,000 in 2014. Criminologists and law enforcement officials worried the country had settled into a "new normal" of violence, especially chaotic retaliatory shootings involving young people.
The prosecuting attorney's office for King County, Washington, which includes Seattle, publishes some of the most detailed regional reports on shootings in the country. In the first quarter of 2022, it logged 384 "shots fired" incidents and 22 people killed. In the first quarter of this year, those numbers were 204 and nine.
"We're still having gang violence. We're still having drive-by shootings. We're still having armed robberies," says Gary Ernsdorff, who supervises the Special Operations Unit in the King County prosecutor's office. "But the numbers across the board in each one of those categories seem to be decreasing."
As the overall volume of violent crimes shrinks, Ernsdorff says he thinks things may simply be returning to normal following the social disruption of the COVID-19 pandemic.
"When people are idle, when kids are not in school, when people aren't employed, they statistically get into more trouble and more criminal acts," he says. "We had a perfect environment to see a spike in crime."
But Jerry Ratcliffe, faculty director of the master of applied criminology program at the University of Pennsylvania, says it's important to keep in mind that other developed countries did not see the same kind of big crime spikes during the pandemic.
"That was really unique to us, which means it leads me to think it was more related to George Floyd," Ratcliffe says. The social upheaval following Floyd's murder in 2020, he argues, disrupted a generation-long decline in crime rates built in part on the data-driven, targeted policing strategies that emerged in the 1990s.
"That's something we saw withdraw for a year or two. What we're seeing now is a re-engagement of policing a few years down the line. And we continue to see again that crime reduction," Ratcliffe says.
LaMaria Pope has had a front-row seat for the recent change. She works for Choose 180, a violence-prevention nonprofit focused on young people in the Seattle area, and she remembers the anxiety of the pandemic years.
"There was a lot of guns floating around," she says. "There was almost nothing to do but engage in crime. And knowing that, 'Oh, we want to defund the police, if we call they're not going to come for two hours' — kids are smart and they picked up on that."
She credits the return to in-person programming, school and structured activities for much of the improvement. "We have a better way to connect and make an influence on our young people," she says.
But Pope isn't ready to declare victory. The cycle of retaliatory violence remains a constant undercurrent in the communities she works with.
"I will say it is better than it was four years ago," she says. "But we're still fighting that fight. It is not over."
Even a record-low homicide rate — 4.1 or even 4.0 per 100,000 — would still be double Canada's rate of 1.9.
"We're still talking about 13- or 14-thousand murders," crime data analyst Asher says. "This is not a solved problem."
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