Homicide rates in America’s largest cities are on pace to be at their lowest levels in more than a century following a dramatic reduction in killings in 2025, according to a new report.
The Council on Criminal Justice said killings across the country fell 21% from 2024 to 2025, and are down 44% in the years since slayings spiked massively in 2021. The CCJ studied homicide numbers from the nation’s 40 most populous cities.
The organization said the FBI’s annual report on national crime trends, which is typically released in the early fall, has a strong chance of showing that the homicide rate fell to 4 per 100,000 residents in 2025.
If that turns out to be the case, the CCJ said that would be the lowest documented murder rate since 1900.
“The overall reduction in crime, especially homicide, is welcome news,” said Ernesto Lopez, the report’s lead author.
“While the big story here is that homicide saw the largest one-year increase and the largest one-year decrease in a short period of time, we should not forget that homicides had been steadily dropping since the late 2000s,” he said. “It is possible that these rates reflect a longer-term downward trend punctuated by periods of elevated homicides.”
Local police statistics show several major cities have witnessed a safe start to 2026 as well.
The New York Police Department reported six homicides through Jan. 18, which is well below the 20 recorded through the same time period last year.
The District saw its first homicide of the year early Wednesday, with police records showing it to be the longest gap in killings in at least 15 years.
Other big cities, such as Chicago, Los Angeles and Philadelphia, also have seen fewer killings in the first three weeks of the new year.
The Council on Criminal Justice found that the nation is seeing a reduction in all types of crime. Of the 13 categories of crimes the organization looked at, 11 of them dropped between 2024 and 2025.
The crimes studied include homicides, carjackings, robberies, shootings, aggravated assaults, sexual assaults, domestic violence, residential and commercial burglaries, thefts and car thefts, shoplifting and drug offenses.
Only drug offenses went up, researchers said, while sexual assaults remained flat.
Despite the positive news, the CCJ still can’t peg what is causing the reversal in crime rates after the pandemic-era crime wave upended public safety.
“We’re seeing big swings in criminal justice policies, programs, and rhetoric, big advances in crime-fighting technologies, and big social, economic, and cultural shifts all happening at the same time,” CCJ President and CEO Adam Gelb said in a statement. “It’s extremely difficult to disentangle and pinpoint what’s actually driving the drop. As a result, we have a battle of sound bites and abundant claims of credit but scarce hard evidence to back them up.”
