Statistics v. Reality: The murder rate

Most Americans think murder rates are rising, and that fighting crime should be a or the top priority of Congress and the federal government. For deeply mysterious reasons this is much more true for Republicans than Democrats, with two thirds of the former believing both of these things i.e., violent crime is out of control and we need to let the police “do their job” without a bunch of stupid liberal restrictions on the Thin Blue Line.

I’ve been tracking this subject very closely for 35 years, which is as long as I’ve been teaching classes that reference criminological data, and here’s the thing: The murder rate in the US is probably at the lowest point it has ever been at ever since the FBI began to compile reasonably consistent national statistics that allowed this to be measured, that is, since the late 1950s. As Jeff Asher outlined in detail a few weeks ago, the murder rate almost certainly hit an all-time low (again this is from a starting point a little less than 70 years ago) in 2025, and will very likely be even lower this year.

To put some concrete numbers on that, the murder rate climbed pretty much constantly during the 1960s and 1970s — the obvious causes here are rock music and television — peaking around 1990 at close to ten murders per 100K population, which was a little more than double the rate thirty years earlier. It then began an equally long decline, falling to about 4.5 murders per 100K in the mid-teens. (Side note: The assertions in Donald Trump’s apocalyptic acceptance speech at the 2016 Republican convention speech were contradicted by almost every possible social statistical metric, and this one — homicide rates — in particular, which had hit close to an all-time low just as he was asserting that America had become a violence-ridden hellhole). It took a huge spike upwards during the pandemic — this is one of the most striking effects of that society-wide catastrophe that we are busy jamming down the the memory hole now — but that spike completely disappeared as soon as the pandemic ended roughly three years ago.

Per Asher’s estimates, it was down to a new all-time low of 4.1/100K in 2025, and is likely to be even lower this year based on the data so far.

I realize this is a bit of an arcane topic, but I’m guessing that if you asked marginal voters to rate the truth of the statements “the murder rate is at an all-time low” versus “the murder rate is at an all-time high” the latter statement would get vastly more support, while recognition of the truth of the former statement would be essentially non-existent. The reasons for this disjunction are almost too obvious to lay out, so I’ll leave that for the comments.

A caveat to all this is that a murder rate of 4/100K is still vastly higher than that found in the developed world, which generally has murder rates four to ten times lower than that. Still, it’s 60% lower than the murder rate thirty-five years ago, which seems like something more people ought to know about, not that that is ever going to happen given the media environment in this country.