America’s murder rate hasn’t been this low in 70 years

A few things are certain in life: death, taxes, LeBron James playing professional basketball — and Americans’ belief that crime is getting worse.

Since Gallup began asking about national crime in 1989, a majority of respondents said they thought crime in the US was higher than the year before in every survey year except 2000, 2001 , and 2025.

Even in that last year, 49 percent still said more crime was happening .

It’s perhaps the archetypal example of negativity bias , the mental habit of giving more weight to bad news than good.

Last week, the FBI put some numbers on just how big that bias is.

The American murder rate — which peaked in 1980 at 10.2 per 100,000 — fell to an estimated 4.1 per 100,000 people in 2025, matching the rates recorded in 1955 and 1956 for the lowest ever measured in the country.

The violent crime rate (murder, rape, robbery and aggravated assault) fell 9.7 percent, the largest single drop since J.

Edgar Hoover was running the bureau in 1936 .

That much is known.

But what’s not known for sure about the crime drop is almost everything else.

Adam Gelb, who runs the Council on Criminal Justice, says that there is no single or easy explanation for the historic lows, while Jeff Asher, the analyst who spotted this decline before nearly everyone else, agrees .

For every leading candidate — federal pandemic spending, some normalization after the 2020 social collapse, better violence prevention, even the decline of drinking — there is a corresponding hole.

But there is one American city where researchers can point to a specific program, measure what it did, and put real numbers on it.

And it just happens to be the city that spent 50 years — and five award-winning seasons on HBO — as America’s shorthand for murder.