In the long run,
the facts are on the side of the optimists.
To paraphrase Martin Luther King Jr., the arc of history bends toward progress. But progress doesn't just happen. People work hard to discover ways forward.
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As recently as 2023, 77 percent of Americans told Gallup that violent crime had gone up over the previous year. In fact, the murder rate had just had its largest single-year drop in history. The following year was an even steeper drop. 2025 numbers are not fully compiled, but that drop looks still steeper. And the news just keeps getting better.
Now, in the middle of 2026, crime analyst Jeff Asher says the numbers are so low that this will probably be the lowest year for murders since the FBI began keeping records.
Perception still hasn’t caught up. Within the past year, for the first time in a generation, less than a majority of Americans (49 percent, so just by a sliver), believed violent crime was higher than a year before. Only 33 percent believed crime had gone down. But actually, except for a spike in crime following the George Floyd killing during the pandemic, violent crime has been falling since the early 1990s.
Typically, people say that their own neighborhood is fine, it’s the nation out there that’s become a raging dystopia.
There is a lot of variation among cities. The number of murders actually rose 45.5 percent in Minneapolis over the past year, a very rare exception. Among the 30 biggest cities, from New York City to Los Angeles, the average drop is 19.1 percent.
Despite this dramatic progress in public safety, the US remains far more violent than other developed wealthy countries. Our record low murder rate so far this year is still twice that of Canada, four times that of the UK, and 20 times that of Japan.
Sources: Gallup; AH Datalytics; Our World in Data