We still have a week to go before the new year rolls in, but unless something truly apocalyptic happens in the next couple of days, 2025 looks to go into the record books with an historic reduction in violent crime; a key issue for President Donald Trump and his administration.
Trump has surged law enforcement in our nation's capital and sent National Guard troops to patrol the streets of cities like Los Angeles (and soon, New Orleans), though the Supreme Court on Tuesday rebuffed his attempt to deploy the Guard to fight crime in Chicago.
Critics of Trump have complained that the administration is diverting law enforcement officers from agencies like the ATF to focus on deportations instead of criminal investigations, but based on the statistics from criminologist Jeff Asher, there's no reason to believe that those deployments are having a negative impact on public safety.
The number of crimes reported to law enforcement agencies almost certainly fell at a historic clip in 2025 led by the largest one-year drop in murder ever recorded — the third straight year setting a new record — and sizable drops in reported violent and property crime. This assessment will not be confirmed until the FBI releases formal estimates for 2025 sometime in the second half of next year, but it is based on a variety of sources all saying the same thing.
Critics of Trump will argue that crime was already declining when he took office, but they also contend that his policies will cause crime to go up. Instead, the decrease in homicides was even steeper this year than in 2024, according to Asher. The FBI's current estimate is that homicides declined by 15% last year, though Asher says that number is likely to be revised upward. His Real Time Crime Index, however, shows a 20% drop in murders among the 570 law enforcement agencies that the RTCI draws its data from.
And as Asher points out, it's not just murder showing this positive trend.
Other types of crime are seeing large reported declines as well. These drops range from a nearly 23 percent decline in motor vehicle thefts in the RTCI to a smaller 9 and 8 percent drop in theft and aggravated assault respectively according to the RTCI. These numbers won’t be finalized for a while, but they paint the picture of large drops in crime even if the current numbers potentially overstate that drop by a small bit.
The drop has been felt everywhere with sizable declines in every crime type across every population group that is measured by the RTCI.
I'm not an unabashed fan of every one of President Trump's public safety policies, but there is no denying that it hasn't led to an explosion of violent crime. Quite the opposite. President Trump hasn't delivered peace on earth (or goodwill towards men, for that matter), but he has made the United States and cities like Washington, D.C. much safer places than they were twelve months ago, and without implementing or even calling for any new gun control laws.
Again, quite the opposite. Yes, the DOJ under Pam Bondi continues to defend virtually all federal gun statutes (some more aggressively than others), but the DOJ has also taken historic steps to curb Second Amendment abuses in Los Angeles County, the U.S. Virgin Islands, and now Washington, D.C., where the administration is suing over the District's ban on so-called assault weapons.
Anti-gunners can't credit fewer guns for the decline in crime either. While sales have softened significantly since the Great Gun Run of 2020, there are still a million NICS checks performed on firearm transfers each month. Some of those checks are for purchases of used firearms, but we're still talking about hundreds of thousands of new firearms entering the hands of civilians every month... and violent crime dropping at record paces at the same time.
President Trump can take a victory lap for his public safety successes, but so too can gun owners and Second Amendment advocates who've long argued that more guns doesn't automatically mean more crime. There are a lot of variables at play behind the historic decline in violent crime, but fewer firearms in the hands of the American people isn't one of them.
