During the first half of 2025, homicide was down nearly 20 percent across 30 of the largest U.S. cities, compared to the same period last year, according to a new study.
Large cities like New York and Philadelphia helped drive the 17 percent decline, with 16 and 13 percent declines, respectively.
In some cities, the plunge was even larger.
There were 45 percent fewer homicides in Denver, 35 percent fewer in Louisville, and 33 percent fewer in Chicago during the first six months of this year, per the study.
If current trends hold the rest of the year, it would be third straight year of record declines in homicides, according to a New York Times analysis.
The precipitous drop in killings mirrors a larger decline in crime captured by the study.
There were 10 percent fewer aggravated assaults, 21 fewer gun assaults, and 10 percent fewer sexual assaults during the first half of this year compared to the same period in 2024, while robbery was down 20 percent, per the study from the Council on Criminal Justice.
However, there was a modest 3 percent rise in domestic violence so far this year.
“Though these declines are promising, especially the drop in homicide rates, crime trends can be deceptive,” the council said in a statement about its findings. “After reaching an historic low in 2014, the national homicide rate spiked by 23% just two years later. While there are plausible theories for that turnabout, and for the volatile patterns over the past five years, the drivers of these trends are poorly understood.”
The findings are a dramatic reversal from the homicide spikes that occurred during the height of the Covid pandemic, which saw one of the highest leaps in killings in U.S. history between 2019 and 2020.
In some places, the following year was even worse.
In 2021, a further 12 cities experienced record levels of homicide, including six cities that had just set records in 2020: St Paul, Minnesota; Toledo and Columbus, Ohio; Louisville, Kentucky; Baton Rouge, Louisiana; and Indianapolis, Indiana.
Observers blamed a variety of causes for the crime wave, ranging from the economic dislocations of the pandemic to the social unrest of the 2020 racial justice protests.
Concerns over crime were deeply impactful political during the last few years, leading to the ouster of progressive prosecutors like Chesa Boudin in San Francisco, as well as giving fuel to Donald Trump’s “law and order” message on the 2024 campaign trail.
