In less hectic times, or ones in which good news earned as much attention as bad, it might be the biggest story of the moment. In city after city, violent crime has declined so much that it raises the possibility that the country’s murder rate this year may drop to the lowest ever recorded. The national database stretches all the way back to 1960. If those were the halcyon days, then so are these.
The president may soon opportunistically take credit — perhaps praising the effect of immigration enforcement, perhaps the return of law-and-order Republicanism — or he may see a greater opportunity in continuing to fearmonger about America’s cities, by and large blue. But most of us haven’t even clocked the improvements, with some quickly moving from worry over pandemic-era spikes in violent crime to alarm about lower-level social disorder and antisocial behavior. This should be a sign that on the most important metrics things have meaningfully improved. But the fact that so few of us feel as if we’ve entered a golden age of public safety may also teach us an important lesson about the politics of crime: that we often get them upside down.
Last year may have measured the largest murder decline in the country’s recorded history, likely breaking a record set in 2023 and making this year’s ongoing improvement on that base line even more remarkable. In Baltimore, homicides were down 23 percent between 2023 and 2024, and in the first four months of this year have dropped again, from 57 murders last year to 39. In St. Louis, the year-on-year drop was 34.5 percent; in New Orleans, 30.6 percent. In February 2025, Chicago had 35 percent fewer murders than in February 2024, according to preliminary data from its police department, and 49 percent fewer than in February 2023.
The pattern applies not just to cities with reputations for violence but also to relatively safe ones — and to metropolises both large and small: Denver, Boston, Los Angeles, Philadelphia.
And then there is San Francisco, which became the poster child of urban disorder in the aftermath of the Covid emergency, not just serving up doomer catnip to Fox News audiences but also contributing to a new reactionary politics in Silicon Valley that has since been exported to the national stage. In 2024, the murder rate in San Francisco fell by 31 percent. In more common but less reliably reported categories, the drops were similar: robbery down almost 22 percent, with assaults and burglary and arson all falling, too. So far this year, the improvements continue to be eye-popping — compared with those encouraging 2024 numbers, murders were down 23 percent through late May. Rapes are down 32 percent, after a smaller decline last year; robberies are down nearly 23 percent, burglaries 22 percent, larceny and arson by 27 and 20 percent.
These are enormous declines, and in parts of the Bay Area they are understood as vindication for the new mayor, Daniel Lurie — who won election last fall partly on promises to curb crime and drug use — and for the general rightward swing of the city’s politics in recent years. Since the pandemic, the state of California has taken a harsher approach to reducing social disorder of various forms, especially homelessness and drug use. And in April, Lurie, a moderate Democrat, took stock of his first hundred days emphasizing a decline in street encampments before the drop in crime. Friends who live there have described it to me as feeling like a whole new city; others passing through have described the improvement as “magical.” On social media, you see people wondering whether San Francisco is now “the cleanest big city in America.”
Of course, the Bay Area crime declines preceded that political phase shift — as the outgoing mayor, London Breed, left office, she celebrated a 20-year-low for the city’s crime rate. And since the local pattern so matches national trends, it suggests that they are less powered by local policies or leaders than by national forces.
When certain cities scream out as violent outliers — as, say, Chicago and Baltimore did in the 2010s — one might want to look for local causes. The same goes when one city suddenly darkens with crime. In this sense, San Francisco was always a strange choice as a parable of new urban chaos. As a city it has a long and, indeed, famous history of visible social disorder, and murder and unsheltered homelessness and drug overdose have not exactly exploded since 2020.
And when all the country’s major cities are moving more or less in unison, it probably makes more sense to take in the big picture first, focusing on things like the passing of the pandemic emergency, the end of the George Floyd protests and the police pullback that followed, and the broad return of something like social normalcy. In examining the cause of the crime spike, a report from Brookings last year emphasized local unemployment and school closures in the spring of 2020, before Floyd was even killed. Considering the recent crime drop, The Economist recently emphasized the hundreds of millions of dollars spent by the Biden administration on community violence interruption programs, now imperiled by the Department of Government Efficiency and Trump administration budget cuts. But it’s not just violent crime that is now falling from pandemic peaks; so are fatal car crashes, drug overdose deaths, even chronic absenteeism in schools. “Nature is healing,” went the social-media jokes in 2020. In 2025 the cities are, too. Across the country, even mass shootings are down.
But the San Francisco story also matches the pattern of the original crime-decline miracle in the 1990s, where much-hyped tough-on-crime and quality-of-life initiatives officially arrived in many places only after the wave of violence had already begun to crash. Back then, both violent crime and its miraculous improvement were so concentrated in New York City that it became the obvious case study for anyone looking for a replicable plug-and-play policy model. And the just-so story was pretty straightforward. After decades of rising crime and distressing unrest, the city decided it had enough, elected Rudy Giuliani as mayor and welcomed as his aide-de-camp police commissioner Bill Bratton, who implemented the “broken windows” theory of policing advanced by the social scientists James Q. Wilson and George L. Kelling, who emphasized the importance of things like cleaning storefronts of graffiti and neighborhoods of out-in-the-open drug use — and suggested that once cities looked more orderly and peaceful they would quickly become so.
But as Peter Moskos illustrates in “Back From the Brink,” a remarkable new oral history of policing New York in that period, crime was falling well before Bratton implemented broken windows — indeed, before Rudy Giuliani was elected mayor in part on fears of crime. Homicides in New York peaked in 1990 and had already fallen by about a third by 1994, Giuliani’s first year as mayor; indeed, more than 40 percent of the city’s miraculous 1990s homicide declines took place in those four years. Depending on which academic you ask, broken windows policing may have contributed to crime declines, but it also functioned like window dressing: a way of advertising improvements in the safety and livability of the city to those who might not have otherwise noticed them.
Across the country, in cities emerging from pandemic struggles, we’re doing something similar now, turning to the problems of social disorder — homelessness and open-air opioid use, turnstile hopping and the smell of weed — less out of desperation to reduce crime and more for its own sake. Broken windows is no longer a strategy to reduce violence but a successor goal.
Homelessness, addiction, mental illness: each of these is a genuine social crisis. But I don’t see compassion for the vulnerable so much as resentment of them behind large-scale efforts to criminalize homelessness, for instance, or sometimes simply to harass those living on the streets — forcing them out of sleeping bags, making them move 300 feet every hour, or having police officers round them up even when no shelter space is available. Liberal wonks have spent the last half-decade arguing that the country’s homelessness problem was primarily a housing issue, only to watch liberal elected officials responding to constituent pressure by taking a more carceral approach.
Pointy-headed optimists have complained for decades that Americans were, by and large, hysterical about crime — seeing endless loops of bad news on local TV and always seeming to believe that things were both much worse than they really were and getting worse still. Surveys tell a more complicated story, with Americans generally responsive to trends even as they may often overestimate the size of the problem. In the early 1990s, when violent crime was close to its worst, 87 percent of Americans thought things were getting worse nationally; that figure fell all the way to 41 percent in 2001, tracking the improvements in rates of homicide and violent crime. More recently, in 2020, 38 percent believed there was more crime in their area than the year before; in 2021 the figure jumped 13 points, to 51 percent, then jumped again to 56 percent around the pandemic crime wave in 2022, before falling back to 49 percent last fall.
These numbers are still high, given that national crime rates are falling so quickly. And, as with many aspects of American life, a huge partisan gap has opened up, with 90 percent of Republicans telling Gallup last fall that crime was getting worse in the country, compared with just 29 percent of Democrats. But as crime dramatically improves, the stories we tell ourselves have changed, too, away from the concrete risks of direct violence and toward more ambient impressions of decay and decline — and the unwelcome feeling of unease they produce.
Perhaps this is natural, or even a sign that we always had these forces backward — with social disorder possibly representing the more pressing complaint for many Americans, and crime rates merely a proxy for that. For me, it’s a distressing possibility that law and order vibes could be more important to my neighbors than actual rates of murder or rape, with a liberal-democratic model of policing losing out to one even its advocates describe in terms of “social control.”
It all may also be a passing trend, less a revelation about social preference than a lag in public perception, shaped in part by what seemed for a stretch like a genuine crisis for American cities. A few years ago, experts remembering the 1970s and 1980s warned of cities trapped in postpandemic “doom loops.” But after a half-decade of hand-wringing about urban population loss, those cities are starting to fill up again, the Census Bureau recently reported, with metropolises of nearly all sizes and all regions, growing again in 2024. The city that grew the most was New York.
Future reading
Two new books, one recently released and one forthcoming, retell the epic story of life on Earth from first principles — or rather first principle, singular, since they are both sprawling and poetic meditations on the power and peril of carbon. In his version, “Carbon: The Book of Life,” Paul Hawken suggests that climate campaigners — he has been quite a prominent one himself — have gone awry in vilifying carbon rather than recognizing its majestic contributions, and the lessons of interdependence and planetary complexity it offers. In “The Story of CO2 Is the Story of Everything,” Peter Brannen delivers a moving and magisterial tribute to the magic-seeming chemical interplay of air and rock, plant kingdom and ocean expanse, which scientists dryly call the “carbon cycle.” Upon it, he shows, absolutely all life rests — with growing, and unnerving, precarity.
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