Crime data analyst Jeff Asher says the United States almost certainly had the lowest murder rate ever recorded in 2025, and "the available evidence suggests that we're going to go even lower this year."
Asher published his prediction in late May, basing it in part on the early data he collects directly from about 600 police agencies for his site The Crime Index.
The Crime Index shows murders dropped 18.7% in the first four months of this year, compared to the same period last year, and all violent crime dropped 6.4%.
An important caveat in the historical record is that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention "have good homicide data back to 1930 or so, and there's a few years in the 1950s that were slightly lower than 2025," Asher says. "But if you put another big drop on top of that, then you're talking about this year potentially being the lowest homicide rate ever recorded, too."
The Crime Index shows the national murder rate spiking to 6.8 deaths per 100,000 in 2021 — a 54% increase over the previous low of 4.4 deaths per 100,000 in 2014.
The prosecuting attorney's office for King County, Washington, which includes Seattle, logged 384 "shots fired" incidents and 22 people killed in the first quarter of 2022, and 204 and nine in the first quarter of this year. "We're still having gang violence. We're still having drive-by shootings. We're still having armed robberies," says Gary Ernsdorff, who supervises the Special Operations Unit in the King County prosecutor's office. "But the numbers across the board in each one of those categories seem to be decreasing."
Ernsdorff says he thinks the decline may reflect a return to normal after pandemic disruptions: "When people are idle, when kids are not in school, when people aren't employed, they statistically get into more trouble and more criminal acts. We had a perfect environment to see a spike in crime."
Jerry Ratcliffe, faculty director of the master of applied criminology program at the University of Pennsylvania, says other developed countries did not see the same pandemic-era spikes and that the U.S. pattern "was more related to George Floyd." "That's something we saw withdraw for a year or two. What we're seeing now is a re-engagement of policing a few years down the line. And we continue to see again that crime reduction," Ratcliffe says.
LaMaria Pope, who works for Choose 180, a violence-prevention nonprofit in the Seattle area, described pandemic-era conditions: "There was a lot of guns floating around. There was almost nothing to do but engage in crime. And knowing that, 'Oh, we want to defund the police, if we call they're not going to come for two hours' — kids are smart and they picked up on that." She credited the return to in-person programming, school and structured activities: "We have a better way to connect and make an influence on our young people," she says. "I will say it is better than it was four years ago," she says.
Even a record-low homicide rate — 4.1 or even 4.0 per 100,000 — would still be double Canada's rate of 1.9. "We're still talking about 13- or 14-thousand murders," crime data analyst Asher says. "This is not a solved problem."