Crime Is Plummeting. We Can Do More.

America is in the midst of a historic decline in crime. In 2023, murders fell 10 percent, which was then the largest annual drop since reliable records began in 1960. Last year, the country very likely set another record, with a 15 percent drop. This year, murders are on track to set yet another record, having fallen about 20 percent in major cities. Shootings, robberies and thefts have also plummeted.

These declines have erased the spike in crime that occurred during and after the Covid-19 pandemic. Indeed, the murder rate in 2025 could end up being lower than it has been at any other point in at least 65 years. In terms of violent crime, modern America may be safer than it has been in decades, based on data collected by the crime analyst Jeff Asher.

America’s leaders typically rush to move on from a crisis once it is over, but we want to pause on the recent surge of violent crime and its reversal. We see two central lessons from this period that can help policymakers reduce crime even further and make progress against other societal ills.

The first lesson is the importance of public trust and stability. Think back, as unpleasant as it may be, to 2020: The virus was spreading. People could not visit family members and friends. They could not go to churches, libraries or restaurants. Children were stuck at home and saw their friends only on screens. Weddings, funerals and graduations were canceled.

Around the same time, America’s political divisions became even more intense than usual. George Floyd’s murder in May 2020 increased tensions about racial justice and the conduct of the police, leading to large protests and occasional riots. A close presidential election eventually led to a violent attack on Congress. In the background, people argued bitterly over mask mandates, vaccination rules, school closures and other pandemic policies. Americans did not rally in response to these crises so much as rage at one another about them.

The anger led to a loosening of the behavioral norms that govern society. Americans became more willing to break rules, like speed limits. It was an example of what the sociologist Émile Durkheim called “anomie” — a breakdown in the subtle standards that allow communities to function. Our society relies not just on written laws and policies but also on less formal norms and values to bind us together. These largely unspoken rules range from small to big, such as holding a door open for somebody or calling 911 for a seriously ill neighbor. We behave accordingly, trusting that others will, too. When that trust frays, an everyone-for-himself mentality — the kind you often see in postapocalyptic fiction — can take hold.

During the pandemic, reckless driving, deaths from car crashes and road rage incidents increased. Alcohol and drug deaths also rose. Even little things, like people using phones in movie theaters, seemed to worsen even after Covid receded. It was as if many Americans took a so-called moral holiday.

In periods of anomie, crime tends to rise. It happened in the 1960s and ’70s, when Americans were angered by the Vietnam War, Watergate, racial inequality, inflation and more. Crime began increasing in the early 1960s and did not begin consistently falling until the 1990s. Other countries have experienced similar cycles, including France and Italy before World War II.

The good news is that our recent burst of anomie and crime appears to have been brief. The end of the pandemic and reopening of America allowed people to return to more normal lives, and crime has largely fallen to prepandemic levels. Yet the past several years should serve as a reminder: The United States today is a polarized country with widespread cynicism, and it is vulnerable to outbreaks of anomie.

In 2020, policymakers played a direct role in accelerating anomie by shuttering services that promote social cohesion. Consider school closures. Whether to keep schools closed after the initial months of the pandemic was a difficult decision. But officials at least should have put more weight on obvious costs of closures, including learning loss, social isolation and the possibility that closures contribute to crime. Data has long made clear that murders spike in the summer, when school is out. As the old saying goes, “Idle hands are the devil’s playthings.”

The lesson extends far beyond the question of what the country should do if another pandemic hits. Social cohesion is both valuable and delicate. America has much to lose when it undermines people’s connections to institutions like schools, churches, government agencies and community groups. If we could find ways to restore confidence in those institutions, the rest of our problems would become easier to solve.

The second lesson involves the importance of law enforcement. During the 2020 protests, many progressives embraced calls to “defund the police,” and some prominent Democrats — including then-Senator Kamala Harris of California, Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York and then-Mayor Eric Garcetti of Los Angeles — supported the defund movement. But police funding did not decline much, if at all, in most cities.

Nonetheless, the protesters seemed to have an effect. Some officers, disheartened by public criticisms, quit their jobs. Police departments began reporting staffing shortages. Other officers stayed on the job but pulled back from enforcing the law. Sometimes, this pullback reflected genuine uncertainty among officers about how to do their jobs; other times, it came from a cynical desire to punish communities that police departments considered hostile.

Virtually all sides in the debate made mistakes during this intense period. Among the most damaging was the growing belief among Democratic officials that enforcing the law could be counterproductive when it involved low-level offenses such as public drug use, shoplifting and homeless encampments. Some Democrats believed enforcement of these laws disproportionately hurt minority groups and did not contribute much to public safety.

This argument never made much sense, especially given that polls showed strong support for basic law enforcement across racial and income groups. And the real-world results were miserable. Parts of San Francisco; Seattle; Portland, Ore.; and other cities came to feel lawless, with people defecating and shooting up in public and store owners locking up items to reduce theft or simply closing their shops.

The situation has partly reversed in the past few years. The defund movement is considered a failure, and many of its old backers have distanced themselves from it. Police departments have stopped shrinking. Some departments have even increased recruitment and staffing levels. Local officials brought back tougher policing strategies, and some states, including California and Oregon, have rolled back laws that reduced penalties on low-level offenses. This shift is likely helping suppress crime.

With crime falling, however, there is a risk that public officials will once again become complacent. Democratic leaders, in particular, should remember the pandemic-era crime spike. They should continue their worthy efforts to reform the criminal justice system: Racial discrimination is a serious problem in policing and the courts, and abusive officers too often escape accountability. But reformers should move carefully and avoid undermining the policies that prevent disorder. They should make clear that most officers do a hard job admirably and provide a crucial service to communities.

It is worth mentioning one factor that has played little role in the recent crime decline, contrary to claims from Mr. Trump. He has suggested that the crime spike was the fault of illegal immigration during the Biden administration and that the reversal stems from his border crackdown. That appears to be simply false. Immigrants, including those who entered the country illegally, commit crimes at lower rates than native-born Americans (in part because of the potential consequences, including deportation). The timeline does not work, either. Murder began surging in 2020, when migration was very low, and began falling in 2023, when it was still high.

Perhaps the most encouraging conclusion from the past several years is that we know more about what drives crime trends than it can sometimes seem. Law enforcement matters, and the national mood matters. So does access to guns; the laws regarding heavy-duty firearms are far too lax, as are the regulations that allow even many people with violent histories or mental illness to own guns. Even at today’s levels, violent crime remains far too common in the United States. No other peer country has nearly so high a murder rate. The recent decline should give Americans confidence that we could make more progress if we were willing to try.