Recent news reports have described a historic decline in crime in the United States. Homicide rates have fallen to levels not seen since around 1990, and a wide range of serious offenses — nine major categories, including murder, burglary and assault — have dropped by more than 10% in the past year alone.
For many readers these claims may sound surprising or even suspicious. I recently had a discussion in one of my classes where students expressed disbelief about the claim. That skepticism is understandable.
We are living in a moment of widespread distrust of institutions, including mass media and government agencies. At the same time, we are constantly exposed to vivid and disturbing news about violence — school shootings, assaults caught on video and clashes between protesters and law enforcement. When those images dominate our feeds, it can feel wrong to say that crime is declining.
As a criminology professor, I want to emphasize that there are very good reasons to have confidence that this crime drop is real.
First, the long view matters. Since crime rates peaked in the early '90s, the U.S. has experienced a broad, sustained decline in both violent and property crime. This trend has not been perfectly smooth — there were setbacks, including a sharp rise during the COVID years — but the general direction over the past generation has been downward. Fewer crimes are being reported to police, and fewer arrests are being made across most offense types.
Some critics argue that official crime statistics cannot be trusted because they depend on police behavior. After the protests following the killings of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor and others, concerns were raised that police might pull back from enforcement or that victims might stop reporting crimes because of diminished confidence in law enforcement. Those are important questions — and criminologists take them seriously.
That is why we do not rely on police data alone.
Certain crimes are especially reliable indicators of broader crime trends. Homicide, for example, is very difficult to conceal. Bodies generate investigations, missing persons are reported and witnesses are often present. Similarly, vehicle theft tends to be accurately reported because insurance claims usually require a police report. When these offenses rise or fall sharply, they tell us something meaningful about overall crime conditions. Both have been trending downward.
Criminologists also use data sources that do not depend on police activity at all. Self-report studies ask people — often teenagers and young adults, the age groups most involved in crime — about their own lawbreaking. Victimization surveys ask respondents whether they have experienced specific crimes, regardless of whether they reported them to police.
These independent data sources tell the same story as official statistics: substantial, sustained declines in both serious and less serious offenses, across cities, suburbs and rural areas, and in different regions of the country.
Why is this happening? There is no single agreed-upon explanation, but some factors are especially compelling. Demography is one. The U.S. birth rate has been falling for decades and dropped sharply during the Great Recession of 2008-09. As we move through the 2020s, there are simply fewer teenagers and young adults — the life stages when criminal behavior is most common.
Technology also matters. Social interaction has changed dramatically in the past two decades. Young people now spend much more time interacting online and less time face-to-face. This is important because most crime is social: It happens in groups. When in-person interaction declines, one of the key conditions for many forms of crime is reduced as well.
None of this means that violence has disappeared, or that fear and trauma are misplaced for those who experience them directly. But it does mean that the broader picture is more encouraging than it may feel. In this case, despite a healthy and warranted skepticism toward institutions, the evidence from multiple independent sources points in the same direction.
Crime really is down — and that is something worth understanding clearly, even in an age of doubt.
Nick McRee is a professor of sociology and social work at the University of Portland. He can be reached at mcree@up.edu.
Have something to say about this? We’re dedicated to publishing a wide variety of viewpoints, and we’d like to hear from you. Voice your opinion in The Beacon.
