The numbers are in, and they are not close.
Democrats are going to hate.
And Kash Patel just delivered one victory that will have Trump grinning from ear to ear.
What the FBI’s Uniform Crime Report Actually Shows
Violent crime rates in the US have plummeted, with the nation’s murder rate reaching a 20-year low in 2025 and violent crime overall showing the biggest one-year drop on record, according to data from the FBI’s annual crime report.
Under Kash Patel, the FBI, which compiles crime data from about 87% of the country’s police departments, shows an 18.1% decrease in the murder rate compared with the prior year, with aggravated assaults falling by 7.2%, rapes declining by 7.6%, and robbery down 18.5%.
Those are not rounding errors. Those are historic reversals across every major category of violent crime, all in a single year.
The 2025 murder rate of 4.1 per 100,000 inhabitants is tied with 1955 and 1956 for the lowest murder rate the FBI has ever recorded. That puts the country back at a level of safety most Americans alive today have never seen.
Motor vehicle theft decreased by 22.7% in 2025 and burglary decreased by 15.8%. Property crime did not escape the trend. It collapsed too.
“The 2025 crime data in this report shows the single largest decrease in violent crime and murder since 1937 — as well as huge decreases across the board in terms of aggravated assault, rape, and robbery,” said FBI Director Kash Patel.
And Patel did not stop there. “This FBI has led the charge to arrest eight of the top 10 most wanted fugitives on planet Earth in the last 16 months,” the FBI Director said at the police academy event.
“Preliminary trends for 2026 are showing additional decreases in crime,” Patel noted in the report. Meaning this is not a one-year blip. The trajectory is continuing to steepen.
Trump Takes the Credit — and Makes the Case
President Trump did not let the moment pass quietly. “Today I’m thrilled to announce that the FBI has just released the new Uniform Crime Report showing that in 2025, we achieved the single largest reduction in violent crime in American history,” the president said.
“We ended the war on police, and we declared a very strong war on crime,” Trump said during his appearance on Long Island. “With your help, last year we achieved the largest drop in murder rate ever recorded, the lowest level in 125 years,” he told a crowd of police officers.
The White House was ready with the framing before the numbers even hit the wire. “President Trump promised to make America safe again and the data proves he has done just that,” said White House spokesperson Lauren Bis.
“Unlike Defund-the-Police Democrats, President Trump will always stand with our law enforcement officers and deliver safer American neighborhoods,” she added.
That contrast is worth sitting with for a moment. The same political party that spent 2020 chanting about defunding police, that watched cities burn and called it mostly peaceful, that let progressive prosecutors gut bail requirements and release repeat offenders back onto the street — those are the people now trying to explain away numbers that embarrass their entire governing philosophy.
The analysis includes data from more than 17,000 law enforcement agencies, and every city with a population of over 1 million contributed a full year’s worth of data, the report said. This is not a cherry-picked sample. It is the most comprehensive picture available.
The Experts Weigh In — and the Debate Gets Interesting
Not everyone is ready to hand Trump full credit, and that is a fair conversation to have.
“This release confirms that crime in the U.S. is falling at or near a historic clip,” said Jeff Asher, co-founder of the data analytics firm AH Datalytics. “This is the third straight year of a record drop in murder and the data for 2026 points to a continued large drop this year.”
But Asher’s own framing points to something the administration’s critics are trying to use against it. Adam Gelb, CEO of the Council on Criminal Justice, a nonpartisan think tank that releases early analysis of police department data each year, said: “The homicide drop is historic and crystal clear. Rates are falling in cities with very different public safety strategies, economic conditions, and political leadership.”
Despite the administration’s focus on federal action, many criminal justice experts argue that the downward trend results from several complex factors rather than a single policy. That is the kind of careful hedging analysts are paid to produce.
And yet here is the thing the hedgers never quite get around to saying out loud: when crime spiked after 2020, those same voices were not nearly as reluctant to assign causation. The same institutions that blamed Trump for a pandemic-era crime surge they attributed to his rhetoric are now urging caution about giving him credit for numbers that go in the other direction. That asymmetry is worth noticing.
Both the violent crime and murder rates have decreased annually since spiking in 2022. The violent crime rate fell by 4.5% in 2024, while murder and nonnegligent manslaughter decreased by 14.9%. The trend accelerated the moment Trump took office again. That is not a coincidence that requires no explanation.
The defund-the-police movement did real damage. Departments lost officers. Morale cratered. Prosecutors in major cities stopped pursuing cases. The predictable result was a crime wave that hit working-class and minority neighborhoods hardest — the exact communities the Left claimed to be protecting. Restoring a culture where law enforcement is backed, funded, and empowered matters. The data now says so plainly.
The report also found that reported hate crime incidents decreased about 7%. Even that number went in the right direction.
The administration came to Long Island with Attorney General Todd Blanche and FBI Director Kash Patel flanking the President. That is not a coincidence of scheduling. It is a signal about priorities. When the top law enforcement officials in the country stand together and say the approach is working, and the FBI’s own data confirms it, the burden of proof shifts to those arguing otherwise.
Democrats spent years telling Americans that public safety was complicated, that more policing made things worse, that the answer was social workers and community programs. The voters who pushed back on that in 2024 now have 90 years’ worth of crime data vindicating their instincts.
The numbers are the best numbers anybody has ever seen on crime. President Trump said exactly that. And for once, the FBI report agrees with him completely.
Sources: CBS News, FBI Uniform Crime Report 2025, FBI press release, Washington Examiner, Fox News Digital, Daily Caller