In 2025, for the first time since 2017, fewer than 150 people were slain in D.C., continuing a decline in violent crime that began in 2024.
D.C. experienced a 32 percent drop in homicides for the second consecutive year, according to city data, with police investigating 127 homicides in 2025 compared to 187 in 2024 and 274 the year before, the deadliest year in more than two decades.
There were also fewer shootings, robberies, carjackings and instances of sexual abuse reported last year, data shows. As of Dec. 25, nearly 500 fewer people had been injured by gunfire in the city than two years prior, when a spike in gun violence rendered the nation’s capital one of America’s deadliest cities.
And despite a tumultuous year for the D.C. police department — including a federal takeover, a departing police chief and two federal investigations into allegations of crime-statistic manipulation — officers are arresting more suspected killers. D.C. police closed roughly 80 percent of homicide cases in 2025, marking the department’s highest rate of case closures in over a decade.
D.C. follows a national trend of declining homicides, with the Real-Time Crime Index indicating 2025 marked the largest one-year drop in U.S. homicides ever recorded.
Chuck Wexler, director of the Police Executive Research Forum, a law enforcement think tank, said last year represented a return to normalcy after a pandemic-related crime surge. “The criminal justice system really broke down, and what you see now is a system that at least is operating the way it was prior to the pandemic,” Wexler said.
Assistant D.C. police Chief Jeffrey Kopp credited the decrease in killings and uptick in arrests to a confluence of factors, including the first full year of the department’s Real Time Crime Center, strategic patrol deployments based on criminal intelligence and working with the U.S. attorney’s office to obtain warrants.
He said the police department coordinated with city leaders to direct resources to neighborhoods frequently impacted by violence “to make sure that we’re treating some of the root causes for this violence as opposed to just trying to arrest our way out of everything.”
President Donald Trump cracked down on crime in the nation’s capital in 2025, ordering a 30-day emergency in August during which he federalized the city’s police department and deployed the National Guard.
He described D.C. as “a situation of complete and total lawlessness,” a characterization that many D.C. leaders resented, as violent crime had receded in 2024 and continued to do so in 2025. The emergency declared by Trump spanned from Aug. 11 through Sept. 10. But an order from D.C. Mayor Muriel E. Bowser (D) indefinitely extended the collaboration between local and federal law enforcement, and National Guard troops remain in D.C.
“From my perspective, it’s been a success,” Kopp said of the federal law enforcement surge. “It’s no secret that the police department has been trying to do more with less in recent years, so their additional staffing and expertise in these areas has really been helpful to us.”
The D.C. police union and some officers welcomed the federal intervention as the department’s ranks have shrunk to half-century lows, meaning long overtime hours.
As of November, the department employed 3,188 sworn officers, significantly shy of the 4,000 officer goal. Kopp said the D.C. police department’s homicide unit has long included some federal officers, but the bolstered partnership has meant more resources and expertise. Now, he said, as city detectives and FBI agents investigate cases, the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives processes ballistic evidence and the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration conduct forensic testing in drug-related cases.
“Everybody working together really streamlines the available resources we have to make things move ever faster,” Kopp said. “That’s really been part of the key to catching and identifying these homicides suspects and taking them off the streets before they can harm anybody else.”
But the federal law enforcement surge has been met with criticism by D.C. Council members, local advocacy groups and city residents, many of whom want D.C. Mayor Muriel E. Bowser and incoming Police Chief Jeffery Carroll to do more to extricate the department from Trump’s immigration agenda. As D.C. police have continued to patrol with immigration authorities, residents have expressed distrust in the department.
Kopp said D.C. police do not patrol with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement — but he acknowledged that all federal agents patrolling with D.C. police have the authority to conduct immigration enforcement.
“Even though we may not be working with ICE, unfortunately some of these other agencies who are out there may conduct an immigration investigation on their own,” Kopp said. “But that’s not anything that [D.C. police] initiate.”
“If you call 911, MPD is going to come to your door. We’re not going to show up with HSI, and the ATF and the FBI. If our community needs us, and they need our help, we are going to be there,” Kopp said. “I know we’ve got some trust to rebuild with the community… we’re doing the best we can do with the mandate we’re under.”
The falling homicide rate offers little solace to the 127 families in D.C. left to grieve their loved ones that were killed this year.
Trump has repeatedly and falsely claimedthat he has eradicated crime in D.C. In September, he told reporters that “Washington, D.C., is a totally safe city. You’re not reporting any crime because there is none. They said crime is 87 percent, and I said, ‘No it’s not. It’s down 100 percent.” In October, during a weekend when three people were found fatally shot, he said, “We’ve got no crime.” And in November, he said “we haven’t had a murder in six months.”
Sixty people were killed in D.C. in the six months leading up that remark. Among them were a 59-year-old man who was eating dinner in his apartment when a stray bullet came through his window, a 21-year-old congressional intern fatally shot near the Walter E. Washington Convention Center and a 3-year-old girl shot while sitting with her family in a parked car.
Abigail Jackson, a White House spokeswoman, said in a statement that local Democrats have ignored D.C.’s crime problem so Trump stepped in to make the District safer. She did not answer questions about Trump false statements about the number of homicides in the city.
On Nov. 8, Tristan Johnson, 17, left his grandmother’s house to rent an electric scooter. He was shot dead in the street in daylight a few blocks from the D.C. Armory. His godfather, Davian Morgan, described Johnson as an inquisitive child who grew to be an entrepreneurial young man, eager to start his own vending machine or trucking company. He enjoyed football and loved his two younger siblings.
When he heard Trump say that there had been no murders in D.C. just two weeks after his godson’s death, Morgan said it felt like “a slap in the face.”
“It feels like an erasure of Tristan’s life and his legacy,” he said
The post For the second year, D.C.’s annual homicide toll declined appeared first on Washington Post.
