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President Donald Trump recently boasted that the nation’s murder rate has “plummeted by 28%” since he took office. Data supplied by local police departments do show the nation’s murder rate is dropping, as it has been for several years now.
Notably, Trump now seems comfortable with crime data that he criticized repeatedly during the campaign as “fake news.”
Throughout the 2024 campaign, Trump insisted that violent crime and murders were on the rise under then President Joe Biden, despite FBI data and statistics from other sources showing that crime spiked in 2020 and had been trending downward since 2022.
But when Trump said at a roundtable with the Fraternal Order of Police on June 5 that “just a few months into office, the national murder rate has plummeted by 28%,” he was citing homicide data provided by law enforcement agencies.
FBI crime data is based on voluntary reporting from local police agencies. Although there is a lag in FBI reporting — the FBI won’t publish its national estimates for 2025 until the fall of 2026 — several groups aggregate data from law enforcement agencies, the same statistics that are reported to the FBI.
One group that compiles such data is AH Datalytics, a data consulting firm that produces its Real-Time Crime Index, an aggregation of crime data collected from 407 law enforcement agencies in the country.
The index shows a sharp spike in murders in 2020, a leveling off and then a steady decline starting in 2022 and continuing through March 2025.
Given the trend, Jeff Asher, co-founder of AH Datalytics who was once a data analyst for the Central Intelligence Agency, wrote in a Substack post that it is definitively “plausible” that the murder rate for 2025 could end up being the lowest rate ever recorded. According to AH Datalytics, the number of murders in the first three months of 2025 was 21.6% lower than the same period the year before.
Those statistics served as the basis for a June 3 article from the conservative news outlet the Daily Signal headlined “Murder Rates Plummet Under President Trump.”
The Daily Signal story included a quote from White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt, saying, “Since President Trump took office, murder rates have plummeted across the entire United States. American families were promised their communities would be safer and President Trump swiftly delivered by vocally being tough on crime, unequivocally backing law enforcement, and standing firm on violent criminals being held to the fullest extent of the law.”
That comment might leave the impression that the trend had reversed since Trump took office. But that’s not what the data show.
“Murder is on the same trajectory it has been on since early 2023,” Asher told us via email. “Murder fell 12% nationally in 2023, probably closer to 15% in 2024, and the early data for 2025 suggests a similarly large (or possibly even larger) drop this year.”
That trend has been echoed by data from other sources. In its data sampling, the Major Cities Chiefs Association showed a 10.4% decline in homicides between 2022 and 2023, and a 16.4% drop between 2023 and 2024. Its data, from nearly 70 law enforcement agencies nationwide, showed a 20.5% drop in homicides in the first three months of 2025 compared with the first three months of 2024.
Similarly, the Council on Criminal Justice found that homicides in 32 study cities dipped 10% between 2022 and 2023, and by another 16% between 2023 and 2024. In its 2024 report, released in January, CCJ reported, “Homicide rates in some high-homicide cities, including Baltimore, Detroit, and St. Louis, have dropped even further, returning to the levels of 2014, when national homicide rates were at historic lows. Rates in other cities have largely returned to pre-pandemic levels.”
According to information from the Gun Violence Archive, gun-related deaths (not including suicides) have been declining since 2021, with a 4.1% drop in 2022, a 6.7% drop in 2023, and a 12.6% drop in 2024. That trend appears to be continuing to accelerate in early 2025.
We reported on these downward trends when, during the 2024 campaign, Trump repeatedly insisted that violent crime, including murder, was rising under Biden and that FBI data indicating the opposite was fraudulent.
When a Time reporter in April 2024 presented the president with FBI statistics that showed a drop in homicides in 2023, Trump dismissed the data as “a lie” and “fake news.”
“There is no way that crime went down over the last year,” Trump said.
In other interviews and public speeches, Trump derided the FBI crime statistics as “phony” and “a fraud.”
During the campaign, Trump preferred to cite data from the government’s National Crime Victimization Survey, which estimates levels of various crimes based on a survey of about 240,000 people each year, asking whether they have been victims of various crimes. Those surveys — which notably do not, obviously, include interviews with the victims of homicide — showed an increase in the violent crime victimization rate between 2021 and 2022. However, NCVS data released in September showed the violent crime rate dipped by a percentage point in 2023, the latest year for which such data are available.
But now that he is in office, and the murder statistics are still showing a decline, Trump turned to citing the figures from law enforcement agencies.
“The only way to get current year data is to sample it from available agencies,” Asher said. “It is indeed the same source that showed a historic drop in murder in 2024 with smaller declines in both property and violent crime.”
This isn’t the first time that Trump has dismissed statistical sources that showed positive results under other presidents, but then embraced those same sources while in office. In his first term, he did the same with employment data.
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