US crime has dropped sharply since the pandemic. Here’s where it stands.

The United States remains in a multiyear trend of falling rates of homicides and other crimes in cities nationwide, ushering in a period of relative safety that rivals the years before the pandemic, according to a Washington Post analysis of data from more than 100 police departments.

The drop in both violent and property crime has extended throughout the country. Rates of aggravated assault and burglary hit their lowest point last year since the start of the pandemic in 2020, when a surge of public safety issues rattled elected officials, law enforcement and the public.

The most striking changes are seen in homicide data. Homicides tumbled by about 38% since 2020 in 52 of the largest cities, some of which are now recording the fewest murders in half a century. Mass shootings, defined as incidents in which four or more victims die, are at their lowest level since The Washington Post began tracking such cases in 2006.

Alex Piquero, a criminology professor at the University of Miami, called the declining crime rates an “everywhere and all-crime phenomena” that suggests the trajectory will be sustained into future years.

“This is a real trend that we are seeing, and I have no reason to think, barring another pandemic, that we are not going to continue to see the declines going forward,” said Piquero, who is a former director of the U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics.

The drop in overall crime comes at a delicate time in the nation’s political debate as President Donald Trump continues to cite crime as justification for deploying the National Guard and other federal law enforcement personnel into major American cities. Democratic leaders, including many mayors, have pushed back on Trump’s threats to militarize urban areas.

They and some criminologists maintain that the decreases, which began under former President Joe Biden, are linked to the Biden administration’s aggressive pandemic-era spending on community-based violence intervention and wraparound social services.

“The federal government has invested in community organizations and seen those as part of the effort to confront violence, and that is a huge change,” said Patrick Sharkey, a sociology and public affairs professor at Princeton University. “There are new groups, who have resources they never had before and they have come together and reclaimed public spaces.”

Yet Sharkey cautions that entrenched poverty, inequality and easy access to guns still make the country vulnerable to future crime spikes. He veers from any prediction, saying that “violence has its own momentum, and it builds on itself.”

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Homicides

Homicides across 52 of the biggest cities fell by about 20% last year, led by cities like Seattle (down 42%), Denver (41%) and Phoenix (14%). Even cities long in the national spotlight saw significant improvements, including Memphis and Baltimore (26 and 31%, respectively).

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Auto thefts

Auto thefts surged in the U.S. in 2021. They began falling three years later, a pattern that continued in 2025.

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Mass killings

In 2025, there were 14 mass killings with a gun — down from 30 in 2024 and 39 in 2023. In the two decades tracked by The Post’s database, the previous low was 19 incidents in 2014 and 2010.

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Burglaries

Burglaries declined during the pandemic, which experts attributed to more people working from home. The overall rate dipped further in 2024 and again in 2025.

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Methodology: The Washington Post has collected crime data since March 2020. The database includes more than 100 police departments across 32 states and D.C. from 2018 through the present year. Those police departments cover about 15% of the nation’s population — mostly in large urban areas. The Post uses this data in an aggregated form as a proxy to measure crime patterns, since research shows that crime in larger cities can often be a good predictor of national trends.

For its mass killings tracker and all its reporting on mass-casualty gun violence, The Post uses data collected by The Associated Press, USA Today and Northeastern University that goes back to 2006. The data track incidents in which four or more people are killed within a 24-hour period, not including the assailant — regardless of the circumstances or where the incident occurred.