US violent crime is at its lowest in more than a century

Andrea Hagan, Loyola University

The United States is experiencing one of the steepest declines in violent crime in modern history, including a murder rate at its lowest point in more than a century.

Homicides across 35 major American cities fell 21% in 2025, amounting to 922 fewer people killed. Robberies dropped 23%. Gun assaults declined 22%. Carjackings plummeted 43%.

Yet the Trump administration has yanked hundreds of millions of dollars from programs that helped make those numbers possible.

As a scholar focused on how policy decisions and structural conditions shape crime in marginalized communities, I see a pattern forming that could put these historic gains at risk.

In April 2025, the Department of Justice terminated 365 previously awarded grants. About US$500 million in promised funds evaporated, affecting more than 550 organizations across 48 states.

The cuts stretched across community violence intervention, victim services, law enforcement training, juvenile justice, offender reentry and criminal justice research.

Then-Attorney General Pam Bondi described the cancellations as eliminating “wasteful grants.” The White House argued the programs had been “funding DEI and cultural Marxism” rather than helping keep Americans safe.

The DOJ’s fiscal year 2026 budget proposal reduces funding for public safety and justice programs by another $850 million.

Programs supporting ex-inmates with temporary housing, job training and healthcare lost $40 million in funding, according to the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University.

Many terminated programs had bipartisan roots. Project Safe Neighborhoods, launched under President George W. Bush in 2001, lost training funds, according to the Council on Criminal Justice. Also cut was an anti-terrorism program that had trained more than 430,000 state and local law enforcement officers since 1996.

Smaller programs suffered too. In rural Oregon, a DOJ grant had allowed the Union County district attorney to hire an investigator who developed leads in a 43-year-old murder case. When the funding vanished, the investigation stopped.

The cuts also come at a difficult moment. States and local governments already face looming shortfalls as billions of dollars from President Joe Biden’s COVID recovery plan expire on Dec. 31, 2026.

Many jurisdictions used that money to build violence prevention programs from the ground up: hiring community mediators, expanding behavioral health teams and launching youth employment initiatives.

In Chicago, the city’s domestic violence prevention budget for 2026 was cut 43%, even as domestic-related homicides rose 13% the previous year.

Criminology research helps explain the danger of abrupt disinvestment. Emory University professor Robert Agnew’s General Strain Theory links economic pressure, blocked opportunities and withdrawal of institutional support to higher risks of criminal behavior.

History reinforces the concern. In 2013, federal spending cuts eliminated services for more than 955,000 crime victims in a single year, while FBI staffing capacity fell by the equivalent of more than 1,000 agents. Between 2014 and 2016, violent crime rose 7%.

Equal Justice USA shut down in August 2025 after losing more than $3 million in DOJ grants. Baltimore’s LifeBridge Health Center for Hope lost $1.2 million used to provide therapy for gun violence survivors.

As of April 2026, the DOJ had not paid out $200 million in approved grants for victims of domestic violence, sexual assault and human trafficking.

Many programs losing funding are the same ones credited with helping drive crime down: conflict mediation teams, youth outreach programs, forensic labs and reentry services.

Public safety infrastructure is rarely glamorous. But when it disappears, the consequences tend to arrive later – and loudly.

[Abridged]