And it's still dropping in his second year. So say Axios as well as the FBI, whose crime statistics have looked like roller coasters over the last decade or so.
Not only has crime dropped, but violent crime has also fallen in record amounts. So have thefts and other property crimes. The places where these declines have taken place also seem surprising:
The FBI's 2025 report indicated that the post-pandemic declines in violent crime accelerated sharply last year in communities of all sizes across the U.S. (That drop appeared to continue during the first half of this year, a separate Axios analysis of big cities' violent crime data found last week.)
Among the declines cited by the FBI:
- Murder and nonnegligent manslaughter dropped 18.1%.
- Robbery fell 18.5%, rape 7.6% and aggravated assault 7.2%.
- Meanwhile, the U.S. murder rate decreased 18.5% to 4.1 per 100,000 residents, tying 1955 and 1956 for the lowest rate since FBI national estimates began. ...
- Cities with 500,000 to 999,999 people had the biggest decrease, 15.3%, including drops of 27.4% in murder, 22.8% in robbery and 12.6% in aggravated assault.
Axios notes that homicides began to decline during the Biden Regency's final two years. That may be true, but it reflects their increase in the first half of the Biden administration. Democrats took the Defund the Police message to heart, especially on the southern border, but also via Department of Justice investigations and coerced settlements with police departments over alleged civil-rights violations, known as "consent decrees."
The Trump administration started off its second term by moving to vacate all such consent decrees and allow police departments to go back to enforcing the law. In May 2025, the DoJ dumped out of all such settlements and declared them an illegitimate intrusion in local and state jurisdictions:
The Justice Department moved Wednesday to cancel settlements with Minneapolis and Louisville that called for an overhaul of their police departments following the killings of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor that became the catalyst for nationwide racial injustice protests in the summer of 2020.
The Trump administration also announced it was retracting the findings of Justice Department investigations into six other police departments that the Biden administration had accused of civil rights violations. ...
“It’s our view at the Department of Justice Civil Rights Division under the Trump administration that federal micromanagement of local police should be a rare exception, and not the norm,” Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon, the new leader of the division, told reporters.
At the time, the press made a minor stink about both the move and its timing, just a couple of weeks short of the five-year anniversary of the death of George Floyd. Dhillon and Donald Trump had it correct, however; these consent decrees acted to discourage effective policing and to inflate obsessions over race and identity rather than crime prevention. Both the Biden and Barack Obama administrations used the DoJ's power to leverage these "consent decrees" into a mechanism that delivered a "defund the police" result without the accountability for pursuing that policy more directly.
The results speak for themselves. Of course, the White House wants to speak about them as well. On Friday, when the first numbers of this report were made public, Trump took a victory lap on Long Island:
The Trump administration has embraced policies that helped fight crime rates: cracking down on criminal migrants, decreasing the number of immigrants trying to illegally cross the border and sending National Guard to big cities like Washington D.C. ...
“We ended the war on police, and we declared a very strong war on crime,” Trump said.
And he pivoted to attacking Democratic policies, reviving his favorite new moniker for them: Dumbocrats.
“Their policies are so dumb,” he said. “Fighting to defund the police. Does that play well in this room? Is there anybody that’s in favor of defunding the police in this particular?”
The enforcement of immigration law certainly played a role in this as well. That should surprise no one, especially as the increases of crime in the first half of the Biden Regency correlated closely to the Biden Border Crisis. That is one reason why deportations of criminal illegal aliens have been an 80/20 issue in the Harvard-Harris CAPS poll for the last two years, and why crime became a front-line issue in the 2024 election:
It's also no mystery why immigration (49%) and crime (47%) are Trump's strongest policy areas in the same poll series. Trump has been undeniably effective in both, and voters still care enough to recognize it. Immigration is still the third-ranked priority for voters, and crime comes in fifth. Inflation and affordability still top the list, but its urgency declined by six points in July while crime actually picked up more interest (by three points).
In other words, this is another winning issue for Republicans in the midterms, if they are wise enough seize it (or maybe pounce?). The Democratic Socialists and their appeasers in Democrat primaries still want to defund the police, open the borders, disband ICE, and put Americans at the mercy of criminals everywhere. And it's not as if the job is finished, either. The Los Angeles suburb of Bellflower can attest to the work remaining today.
Dozens of looters broke into and ransacked a family-owned business during a street takeover in Bellflower, California on Saturday. pic.twitter.com/2FpeyHLBLq
— CBS News (@CBSNews) August 18, 2026
The latest episode of The Ed Morrissey Show podcast is now up! Today's show features:
- Hunter Biden's back, and ... no one can figure out why. Andrew Malcolm and I try to figure out why Hunter's showing up on podcasts these days, and figure the art scene must be getting tough now that his dad's out of office.
- Plus, we discuss Karoline Leavitt's decision to leave the White House and wonder what Donald Trump has in mind. I make a serious nomination for the position, although it's unclear if my choice can do Andy Rooney impressions.
The Ed Morrissey Show is now a fully downloadable and streamable show at Spotify, Apple Podcasts, the TEMS Podcast YouTube channel, and on Rumble and our own in-house portal at the #TEMS page!
Editor’s Note: The American people overwhelmingly support President Trump’s law and order agenda.
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