When Donald Trump fought for and won the 2024 presidential election, his victory was built partly on the false assertion that Democrats were responsible for an out-of-control crime wave in the US, with murders and rapes at record highs.
Figures released by the FBI on Tuesday, however, confirm that the nation was as safe as it ever had been during the final full year of the Biden administration. Every category of crime decreased in frequency, and violent crime in particular dropped to levels not seen since the 1960s, per the report.
The bureau’s annual Reported Crimes in the Nation Statistics report reflects a 4.5% year-on-year decrease in all violent crime nationally in 2024, with murder and non-negligent manslaughter falling 14.5% from the 2023 figure.
Reported rapes were down 5.2% from the year before, while aggravated assaults and robberies declined 3% and 8.9% respectively.
The figures belie Trump’s oft-repeated fear-mongering during the election campaign that “soft-on-crime” Democrats had fueled surging crime rates, particularly in major cities under their control.
In May 2024, for example, Trump told reporters attending his hush-money trial in Manhattan that New York prosecutors were fixated on his prosecution while “people are being mugged and killed outside … [I’ve] never seen anything like it in my life”.
Yet the FBI report shows that murders in cities with more than 1 million residents declined by 19.1%, the highest percentage of any category of crime, while rapes, robberies and aggravated assaults showed drops of between 1% and 9.8%.
“The nation’s murder rate for 2024 was down 26% from 2020’s figure and roughly even, slightly lower actually, relative to where it stood pre-pandemic,” crime analyst Jeff Asher said on his Substack channel Jeff-alytics.
“The nation’s reported violent and property crime rates stood at the lowest levels since the 1960s in 2024.”
Asher injected a note of caution by pointing out that the FBI had added the prefix “reported” to the publication’s former title Crimes in the Nation to reflect the fact that the figures were compiled by voluntary submissions from more than 16,000 state, county, city, university and college, and tribal law enforcement agencies.
“Not every crime is reported to law enforcement and not every agency reports crime to the FBI every year,” he said.
But, he added: “The 2024 data adds confidence that 2025 will feature the lowest murder rate ever recorded. The odds have gone from ‘plausible’ to ‘more likely than not’.”
Overall, the FBI recorded more than 14m criminal offenses nationally in 2024. Reported data, the bureau said, showed that a violent crime occurred, on average, every 25.9 seconds, with a murder every 31.1 minutes and a rape every 4.1 minutes.
The report comprises five sections, including an analysis of the frequency of hate crimes, and the number of assaults or killings of law enforcement officers.
In the former category, data covering 95.1% of the US population showed 11,679 criminal incidents, and 13,683 related offenses motivated by bias toward race, ethnicity, ancestry, religion, sexual orientation, disability, gender or gender identity, small drops from the respective 2023 figures of 11,862 and 13,829.
The Arab American Institute cast doubt on the accuracy of the reporting in a statement.
“Although some bias categories experienced slight declines from last year’s record highs, these numbers should be interpreted cautiously,” Maya Berry, the group’s executive director, said.
“From the chronic underreporting problem to discrepancies in hate crime reporting between communities, to the deeply troubling moves to politicize hate crime data collection, we must understand this data serves as not only a stark reminder of the challenges we face, but a call to action. It underscores the urgent need for civil rights protections that are robust, inclusive, and enforced.”
A dark spot on the report was data showing that 64 law enforcement officers had been killed “feloniously” during 2024 in the line of duty, with firearms used in 46 of the deaths. Additionally, 43 more officers died in accidents over the year, most in vehicle-related incidents.
The number of law enforcement personnel who reported they had been assaulted in 2024 rose to 85,730, a 10-year high. The 2025 figure to be published next year is expected to rise significantly to reflect homeland security department (DHS) claims that assaults on immigration and customs enforcement agency (Ice) officers have risen 830% since Trump’s second term began in January.
Prosecutors, however, have dropped or refused to pursue charges against numerous individuals citing false and misleading reports by immigration officers and video footage showing those accused of assaults were actually the victims.
