The Bureau of Justice Statistics reported Monday that felony violent crime in the United States fell 25 percent in 2025. Rape declined 13 percent, robbery dropped 27 percent, and aggravated assault fell 31 percent. Property crime fell 19 percent. With the exception of rape, those are the largest one-year declines since the agency began tracking the figures 53 years ago.
The numbers mark a sharp turnaround from the prior administration. Felony violent crime rose a record 59 percent and property crime rose 8 percent between 2021 and 2024, according to the same data series.
Murder rates also dropped. The national rate stood at about 4.1 murders per 100,000 people in 2025, a record low, down from 5.1 in 2024. Preliminary FBI data for the first seven months of 2026 show an additional 18.4 percent decline; if that trend holds for the full year, the murder rate would fall to roughly 3.36 per 100,000.
Despite the scale of the shift, coverage of Monday’s release was limited. The New York Post and CBS reported on the new figures, but the Associated Press, Reuters, CNN, NBC News, ABC News, the New York Times and the Washington Post did not publish stories on the data, according to a review by The Federalist.
The muted coverage comes even as polling shows voters remain focused on crime. A Pew Research Center poll in October found 52 percent of registered voters call violent crime a “very important” issue, and an AP-NORC survey found 45 percent of adults named immigration and crime among their top concerns.
What’s behind the decline
Federal officials point to a sharp rise in enforcement activity. FBI arrests climbed 184 percent in 2025 compared with 2024, U.S. attorneys increased prosecutions, and the Trump administration took direct control of law enforcement operations in Washington, D.C., and Memphis. In Washington, the share of arrests resulting in charges rose from about 33 percent under the Biden-era U.S. attorney to 96 percent under the current administration.
The Department of Homeland Security says roughly 70 percent of immigrants deported under the Trump administration had criminal convictions or pending charges. Supporters of the administration’s immigration policy argue tighter border enforcement and increased deportations have also discouraged people in the country illegally from committing crimes, since avoiding police contact reduces their risk of deportation.
In New York, 7,113 immigrants in the country illegally were held in state prisons at the end of 2025, making up 14 percent of the state’s inmate population — a share at least 3.4 times larger than their proportion of the state’s overall population.
A political fight ahead of next week’s elections
The crime data have become a flashpoint in next week’s elections. Some Democrats have taken positions to the left on criminal justice and immigration enforcement. New York congressional candidate Darializa Avila Chevalier has called for abolishing prisons. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, former Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, and Sen. Bernie Sanders have each called for cutting the national prison population in half.
In the House, 61 Democrats voted against a resolution condemning calls to “defund the police,” and 57 House Democrats back fully rescinding ICE funding included in last year’s budget legislation. House Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries has said that if Democrats win back control of Congress, they will work to bring back immigrants already deported by the Trump administration. By contrast, only 15 House Democrats signed a letter stating, “We want safety, not lawlessness.”
Any Democratic push to defund ICE would likely draw a presidential veto, raising the prospect of another prolonged government shutdown fight. The country has already seen a 43-day shutdown in 2025 and a 76-day partial shutdown earlier this year.
Republicans have largely emphasized arrests, prosecutions, incarceration and deportations as drivers of the crime decline, while many Democrats have pushed to reduce incarceration and scale back traditional law enforcement and immigration enforcement. Next week’s elections are expected to be a test of which approach voters want to see continue.
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