Highlights
The FBI recorded a substantial decrease in violent and property crimes.
This article offers possible reasons why and context not offered by the mainstream media.
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A comprehensive overview of crime in recent years is available at “Violent and Property Crime Rates In The U.S.“
Note
Much of the data reported below is documented in Violent and Property Crime Rates In The U.S.
Article
Data reported to the FBI’s Uniform Crime Reporting Program shows that 2024 to 2025 marked the largest year-to-year decline in violent crime rates since FBI estimations began in 1936.
Following the May announcement that violent crime decreased 9.3% from 2024 to 2025, the FBI released detailed data tables on more than 13 million criminal offenses reported to the FBI by participating law enforcement agencies for 2025. The data support the previously released violent crime trends:
- Murder and nonnegligent manslaughter offenses decreased an estimated 18.1%.
- Rape offenses decreased an estimated 7.6%.
- Aggravated assault figures decreased an estimated 7.2%.
- Robbery offenses decreased an estimated 18.5%.
The 2025 murder rate of 4.1 per 100,000 inhabitants is tied with 1955 and 1956 for the lowest murder rate.
Property crime and hate crime also declined in 2025. Law enforcement agencies submitted hate crime reports involving 10,881 criminal incidents and 13,026 related offenses as being motivated by bias toward race/ethnicity/ancestry, religion, sexual orientation, disability, gender, and gender identity.
According to this dataset, reported hate crime incidents decreased 7.0% from 11,404 in 2024, to 10,606 in 2025.
More than 17,000 state, county, city, tribal, and university and college agencies, covering a combined population of 96.2% inhabitants, submitted data to the UCR Program through the National Incident-Based Reporting System (NIBRS) and the Summary Reporting System. Nearly 17,000 (16,791) agencies participated in the Hate Crime Data Collection, with a population coverage of 95.3%.
The complete analysis is located on the FBI’s Crime Data Explorer.
Why? Context And Background
There is no universal explanation for crime decreases or increases. There was a previous 20-year drop in reported crimes (it largely ended in 2014), and there wasn’t a criminologist in the country who could provide a clear and unambiguous answer as to why crime decreased during this period. Crime did not suddenly stop declining in every category or every measure in 2014. Different crime categories and data systems show different patterns.
The FBI offers REPORTED crime. Understanding crime as offered by the FBI means acknowledging that the great majority of crime in the US is not reported. Per the USDOJ’s National Crime Victimization Survey, 30 percent of property crimes (about 80 percent of all crime) are reported. About half of violent crimes are reported.
The FBI’s new National Incident-Based Reporting System (NIBRS) can record up to 10 offenses occurring within a single incident, providing considerably more information than the older Summary Reporting System. However, national crime estimates historically have used SRS-style counting rules, which generally count the most serious offense in an incident. The FBI and BJS have developed NIBRS-based estimation methods to produce nationally representative estimates. There are hundreds of thousands of additional crimes recorded by the FBI that are only offered to the public through special reports.
Having said the great majority of crime is not reported, the USDOJ’s National Crime Victimization Survey shows large increases in rates of violent crime (44 percent) in recent years (2022-2023-2024). To my knowledge, it’s the largest increase in rates of violent crime ever reported. The updated National Crime Victimization Survey for 2025 will be out soon.
Per Gallup, there is more fraud and identity theft than all FBI-reported crimes combined (link below).
Per the Major Cities Chiefs Association, homicides increased 50 percent and aggravated assaults increased 36 percent shortly after the pandemic. In what researchers call a regression towards the mean, crime was bound to decrease. But regression to the mean cannot by itself explain the magnitude or persistence of the decline.
Per Gallup, there was recently a record number of Americans expressing a fear of crime. It’s declined since then, but a large majority of people continue to express fear.
Why-Reasons
CBS News suggested that in today’s digital age, fewer people were out and about in their communities, a hypothesis that I have never heard of before, and I follow crime news daily. The CBS crime reporter stated that there were societal shifts in crime but placed great emphasis on people staying in their homes.
The New York Times stated that the Trump Effect may have had an impact but noted that crime was dropping before the President took office. Yet there are pundits insisting that the President’s actions in Memphis, Washington, D.C., and other cities, plus border and immigration efforts, contributed to the overall decline by making crime reduction a priority and expressing strong support for law enforcement.
There are endless research reports on efforts to combat crime, with most showing limited to no impact. A report offered by the National Academies of Sciences on proactive policing states that the one modality that seems to work is proactive policing.
If Reported Crime Is Decreasing, There May Be Reasons We Haven’t Considered.
But there seems to be good news in terms of alcohol consumption, which is heavily connected to violence.
The rate of younger people in America is decreasing, and criminology 101 suggests that crime is connected to the number and percentage of young people within society.
Mental health problems and drug and alcohol use by younger people are decreasing.
Another possible explanation for fewer reported crimes is that exceptionally high overdose mortality among chronic substance users (the toll approaches two million deaths over time) may have had some effect on crime. It is reasonable to ask whether overdose mortality removed enough high-rate offenders from the community to influence crime statistics. To date, however, this possibility has received little direct empirical study.
A study published in the Journal of Criminology specifically explored whether GLP-1 use was associated with violent crime. It examined the health records of more than two million people with diabetes taking GLP-1 receptor agonists, the class of medications that includes Ozempic and similar drugs. Among their findings, people taking these medications were less likely to develop several conditions, including:
- Alcohol use disorders.
- Drug use disorders.
- Suicidal thoughts and self-harm.
- Some neurological and psychiatric conditions include impulse control.
- For decades, criminologists have found that poor impulse control is one of the strongest predictors of violent offending.
Crime may be shifting. Reports of fraud and identity theft are exploding, per Gallup and the USDOJ’s Bureau of Justice Statistics. Why would a criminal engage in dangerous street robberies for minor gain when he can go on the dark web and rent or buy software or guidance to engage in fraud? It’s much less risky and creates dramatically increased profits.
Those advocating for the rights of firearm owners will insist that there are approximately 300 million privately owned firearms in the US, discouraging criminals from committing crimes.
Property Crimes
The data below indicate the aforementioned shifts in crime. Just note that the methodology used by the FBI (or the National Crime Victimization Survey) is vastly different from the reports below. Not all reports are from 2025.
The Street: “Amazon and Walmart hit by $12.8 billion theft surge.” Package theft, or porch piracy, as it’s known, has become a growing problem, according to the latest report issued by Omnisend. “Combining its original research with FBI crime data, the report found that Americans have suffered a loss of roughly $12.8 billion as a result of about 228 million stolen parcels last year alone,” the study showed. Porch piracy is effectively becoming a hidden cost center of e-commerce logistics.
Per Slate and The National Retail Federation, there had been a 93 percent increase in the average number of shoplifting incidents per year compared to before the pandemic, and a 90 percent increase in dollar loss.
Per Gallup, Americans are most likely to have experienced theft, with 14% saying money or property was stolen from them or another household member in the past year. Vandalism, at 12%, is also one of the more common crimes.
According to Gallup, identity theft and scams are almost two to three times the number of total crimes reported by the FBI.
According to Pew, about a third of Americans report having experienced an online shopping scam.
Overall, adults 60 and older reported losing $2.4 billion to fraud, including money lost to investment scams, according to the FTC’s annual report to Congress. That’s up 26.3% from $1.9 billion in 2023.
Retail shrinkage (shoplifting, organized attacks, and employee theft) hit $94.5 billion, CNN. Data from a variety of sources suggest that shoplifting losses continue to increase.
There are 120 million porch package thefts in the US. Searches for “stolen package” spike every December, according to Google Trends. The survey indicated that there are far more porch pirate thefts than total reported property crimes to the FBI. The financial toll of these thefts is $16 billion.
The Hill (newspaper of Congress) addresses cargo theft. The numbers we do know are concerning. The average value of each cargo theft is more than $200,000, and according to the National Insurance Crime Bureau, there has been a 1,500 percent increase in cargo theft incidents since 2021. Total cargo theft losses increased by 27 percent in 2024 and are projected to rise another 22 percent in 2025.
Check fraud. “This is far from an isolated incident. A recent report from the FBI and the United States Postal Inspection Service (USPIS) shows that cases of check fraud nearly doubled.
Mail Theft. “Letter carrier robberies surged by 845 percent nationwide between fiscal 2019 and 2023, from 64 robberies per year to more than 600. High-volume mail theft has skyrocketed 2,500 percent since 2010, with more than 52,000 reported cases in fiscal 2024, according to federal data obtained by the Postal Police Officers Association.
The data from agencies above includes various dates, suggesting increases. Those increases are obviously not making it into FBI property crime statistics.
Conclusions
After the huge increases in crime after the pandemic, crime was expected to fall, regardless of local politicians throughout the country taking credit. Crime increases and decreases for reasons that are uncertain. There is no universal agreement.
FBI crime data has endless pitfalls, such as the majority of crime that is not reported, per the U.S. Department of Justice’s National Crime Victimization Survey. Per media reports, some police agencies seem to have a difficult time accurately recording crime.
The most logical counterpoint to crimes reported by the FBI is the USDOJ’s 50-year-old National Crime Victimization Survey, and it’s a 44 percent increase in rates of violent crime in 2022-2023-2024. But few reporters or members of the public have a clue as to what’s in the survey. The criminological community and federal agencies (i.e., the Bureau of Justice Statistics and the US Census) consider it to be a more accurate measure of crime than FBI data. They both measure crime, but they measure it differently.
But in the final analysis, the reductions in reported crime as offered by the FBI for 2025 are good news and seem to reflect a turning point after earlier vast increases in crime.
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