CRIMEThe U.S. Murder Rate Fell to Historic Lows in 2025 – Here’s Why
The murder rate in 2025 was the lowest in modern American history. Homicide rates have closely followed three trends over the past decade: alcohol consumption, drug abuse and firearm purchases. Now that the drug and alcohol crises are waning and gun purchases are falling, so too is the murder rate.
The murder rate in 2025 was the lowest in modern American history.
Preliminary data shows the murder rate fell nearly 20% from 2024, likely making it the lowest rate since reliable national data began to be collected in 1960.
Why was the murder rate so low?
I’m a professor of sociology and criminology who studies crime trends. In my book, “Crime Wave,” I explore how homicide rates have closely followed three trends over the past decade: alcohol consumption, drug abuse and firearm purchases. Now that the drug and alcohol crises are waning and gun purchases are falling, so too is the murder rate.
The 2015-2021 Murder Increase
The murder rate’s previous low came in 2014, capping a decline that had been more or less continuous since the early 1990s.
The murder rate usually rises and falls alongside other crimes, so through the 2010s, with property crime and overall youth offending dropping, criminologists expected the murder trend to follow suit.
Instead, the national murder rate increased sharply in 2015 and 2016, and then by an even larger margin in 2020.
Suddenly, it appeared that violent crime was spiraling out of control. By 2021, the homicide rate hit its highest level since the mid-1990s.
Popular, but Incomplete, Explanations
Some researchers and commentators attributed the homicide spikes to a so-called “Ferguson effect” in 2015 and, likewise, a “Minneapolis effect” in 2020. These theories are based on the idea that law enforcement officers were reluctant to be proactive or make arrests after nationwide protests against police brutality related to the police killings of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, in 2014 and George Floyd in Minneapolis in 2020. The evidence for these claims is mixed.
There is little consistent indication that a decline in proactive policing contributed to a crime increase in 2015, although the homicide spike in 2020 was likely exacerbated by a police “pullback”.
Still, the majority of the homicide spike took place before June 2020, when protests over Floyd’s death spread nationwide. A study published in the journal Epidemiology found that the increase began as early as October 2019, suggesting de-policing in the summer of 2020 likely worsened the rise rather than caused it.
De-policing is, at best, an incomplete explanation.
Substance Abuse, Guns and the ‘Homicide Epidemic’
As I document in “Crime Wave,” the crisis in violence was related to another crisis: deaths of despair, which include drug overdoses, suicides and alcohol-related fatalities.
