The Trump administration said its aggressive crime-fighting agenda is responsible for the historic lows in homicides recorded by major cities throughout the country.
The White House said President Trump’s messaging about tackling violence and disorder, such as surging federal law enforcement and National Guard deployments into the District and offering the same to other Democrat-run cities, has brought crime down to a point not seen since the early 20th century.
“Thanks to President Trump’s law-and-order agenda, crime across the country has plummeted to the lowest level in more than 100 years,” White House spokeswoman Abigail Jackson told The Washington Times in a statement.
“President Trump is getting dangerous criminals off the streets, deporting criminal illegal aliens, and is embracing our heroic law enforcement officers like never before. Democrats’ soft-on-crime policies hurt the American people for years. President Trump is undoing that damage,” Ms. Jackson said.
Earlier this year, the Council on Criminal Justice said 2025 was on track to have a national homicide rate of 4 per 100,000 residents. That rate, which won’t be official until the FBI releases its annual report on national crime trends this fall, would be the lowest documented murder rate since 1900.
This year’s decline in killings appears to be even more pronounced.
Leaders in New York City and Baltimore have touted record declines in homicides halfway through the year, while other authorities around the country noted their cities have seen the lowest levels of violent crime in more than a half-century.
New York Police Department Commissioner Jessica Tisch said the 122 homicides logged through the first six months of the year are well under the city’s previous record of 136 slayings recorded in 2017.
Baltimore Mayor Brandon Scott noted that the 50 homicides tallied in his city through July 1 marked the fewest ever counted at the year’s midway point in the city’s history, with Baltimore quickly distancing itself from a long-held reputation as one of the most violent cities in the nation.
“We are making progress on public safety that many thought was impossible,” the Democratic mayor said in a statement.
Mr. Scott credited the Baltimore Police Department, the Baltimore State’s Attorney’s Office, the Mayor’s Office of Neighborhood Safety and Engagement and buy-in from residents for making strides against violence in the city.
“We know that our work is not done; one life lost to violence in our city is one too many,” the mayor said. “But after decades of losing hundreds of friends, family members, and loved ones to gun violence every year, we are finally seeing sustained reductions in shootings and homicides and building the safer, healthier neighborhoods our residents deserve.”
Baltimore had seen a nearly 3% decrease in nonfatal shootings to go with a 23% decline in homicides compared to the first six months of 2025, according to police department records.
The data show the city had more than 150 killings by the halfway point each year between 2019-22, and saw another 142 slayings through that same period in 2023.
The drop in homicides started accelerating in 2024, when Baltimore saw fewer than 100 killings by July 1 for the first time since 2014.
In New York City, authorities said the historic decline in killings matched new record lows in shooting victims and shooting incidents.
The 381 gunshot victims were down from the previous low of 397 in 2025, the NYPD said, and the 322 shooting incidents beat the former record of 337 shooting incidents set in 2018 and matched in 2025.
Police said those improvements were driven by a pronounced drop in crime in the Bronx, which is down 12% year-over-year, and in the city’s public housing complexes, with the nine homicides, 51 shooting victims and 49 shooting incidents through July 1 all representing historic lows.
“New York City’s public safety progress is the result of precision policing and the extraordinary work of the men and women of the NYPD,” Commissioner Tisch said. “They are going after the guns, taking down violent gangs, building the cases, making the arrests, and working foot posts that help keep neighborhoods safe.”
The two East Coast cities join others around the country that have witnessed sharp crime declines of their own.
New Orleans officials said the city counted only 38 killings through June 25, making it a 24% decrease from the 50 homicides police had documented during the same stretch last year.
If current crime trends continue through the rest of the year, New Orleans would end the year with 78 killings. The Times Picayune reported that would nearly match the 76 recorded in 1969.
“Our crime trends are still dramatically going down. And we’re continuing our full-court press,” New Orleans Police Superintendent Anne Kirkpatrick told the newspaper. “We know our strategies are working, and I hope there’s a day we don’t have any gun violence in this city.”
New Orleans earned the notorious title of being the nation’s murder capital in 2022 after the city was overwhelmed with 266 killings.
Similar to many major cities, New Orleans fell into a public safety crisis after nationwide protests against police brutality followed the killing of George Floyd, a Black man, in Minneapolis in 2020.
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