FBI Director Kash Patel on Thursday credited President Donald Trump's law-and-order agenda for what Patel called the largest single-year drop in murders in U.S. history.
Patel pointed to new figures that show homicides falling sharply in 2025, the first year of Trump's second term.
A report released Thursday by the Council on Criminal Justice, a nonpartisan criminal justice think tank, found the homicide rate fell 21% from 2024 to 2025 across 35 U.S. cities included in its analysis, a decline the group said translates to about 922 fewer killings.
The report tracked 13 categories of crime and found declines in 11 of them, including aggravated assaults, carjackings, and shoplifting.
Vehicle theft fell 27%, and shoplifting dropped 10%, the report found. Drug crimes rose slightly, while sexual assaults were flat compared with the prior year.
Posting on social media, Patel said the drop reflects intensified federal enforcement that he said has focused on fugitives, repeat violent offenders, and gang networks.
He accused some news organizations of downplaying the administration's impact and said arrests increased substantially under Trump's public safety strategy.
Patel has also promoted Operation Summer Heat, a summer crackdown he has said led to thousands of arrests and gun seizures with help from state and local agencies.
The Council on Criminal Justice researchers and outside experts cautioned that pinpointing a single cause for the decline is difficult because the drop appears widespread and follows years of volatility during and after the COVID-19 pandemic.
Homicides surged in many places in 2020 and 2021, then began easing in subsequent years. Analysts have pointed to a mix of factors that can move crime numbers, including local policing tactics, community violence intervention programs, shifts in routine activity, and changes in gun carrying and drug markets.
Still, the report's scale is likely to intensify political fights over credit. Republicans have highlighted stepped-up federal deployments and enforcement, while Democrats and some researchers have argued the trend is broader than any one White House initiative and reflects improved conditions across many jurisdictions.
The report also noted key limitations. Its city sample does not represent all U.S. jurisdictions, and it did not include Jackson, Mississippi, or Birmingham, Alabama, two cities that have reported among the highest per-capita homicide rates in recent years.
Critics say such omissions can shape the national picture if readers assume the results capture every high-violence city.
In Washington, the report found one of the nation's largest year-to-year homicide drops. Federal officials have cited task force operations and a focus on illegal guns in the nation's capital, while local leaders have pointed to investigative changes and targeted violence prevention efforts.
Researchers warned that crime trends can reverse quickly and noted that it is too early to know whether the 2025 decline will be sustained in 2026.
Theodore Bunker ✉
Theodore Bunker, a Newsmax writer, has more than a decade covering news, media, and politics.
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