Trump Cites Largest Recorded Drop in Violent Crime as FBI Says Murder Rate Hits Historic Low

WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump has spent much of 2026 saying the United States just posted the largest drop in violent crime on record and a murder rate not seen in 125 years. The FBI’s 2025 crime report, released in August, gives him a large piece of that claim and leaves another piece to researchers who reach further back than the bureau does.

Speaking at the Nassau County police academy on Long Island on Aug. 14, Trump said the new Uniform Crime Report showed that “in 2025, we achieved the single largest reduction in violent crime in American history.” In earlier Oval Office remarks he put the homicide story in a longer frame: “And with your help, last year, we achieved the largest drop in murder rate ever recorded, the lowest level in 125 years. That’s since the year 1900.” In February he told reporters, “The crime rate now is the lowest it’s been since 1900. That’s 125 years.”

The FBI’s own tables for 2025 are narrower and still striking. The bureau estimates 1,119,768 violent crimes nationwide, a 9.3% drop from 2024 and the largest year-to-year decline since it began national estimates in 1936. The violent-crime rate fell 9.7%, from 362.9 offenses per 100,000 people to 327.6. Murder and nonnegligent manslaughter fell 18.1%, to an estimated 14,085 killings, a rate of 4.1 per 100,000. The FBI said that rate ties 1955 and 1956 for the lowest since national estimates began. Robbery fell 18.5%, rape 7.6% and aggravated assault 7.2%. Property crime dropped 12.4%.

Director Kash Patel called the 2025 figures “the single largest decrease in violent crime and murder since 1937.” Jeff Asher, co-founder of AH Datalytics, wrote that the report “confirms that crime in the U.S. is falling at or near a historic clip” and that 2025 was “the third straight year of a record drop in murder,” with 2026 data pointing to another large decline. “The bottom line is that the U.S. murder rate was lower last year than it has been in the lifetime of anyone born after Kennedy was elected president, and it’s plunging even lower in 2026,” Asher said.

The 125-year line does not come from the FBI’s 1936-to-present series. It comes from the Council on Criminal Justice, which combined modern FBI counts with public-health death records back to 1900. In a January analysis of city data, the council said the 2025 homicide rate was on pace to be “the lowest rate ever recorded in law enforcement or public health data going back to 1900, and would mark the largest single-year percentage drop” on record. It projected about 4 killings per 100,000. Asher’s similar estimate was about 4.2. Both sit below the 4.4 rate in 2014, the modern-era low under consistent FBI methods since 1960.

Historians of the data urge caution on anything before 1960. Older FBI returns covered a smaller share of the country and used different definitions. Public-health mortality files fill the gap but are not the same as police reports. That is why fact-checkers have said murders are at multi-decade lows while the exact “since 1900” superlative is less certain than the 2024-to-2025 plunge, which the FBI does call the largest in its national series.

Attribution is the other fight. Crime was already falling before Trump returned to office in January 2025. Homicides jumped nearly 30% in 2020, the largest one-year rise in FBI records, then began dropping in the second half of 2022. The 2025 collapse is the steepest year in that unwind. The White House calls it a “Trump effect” and points to National Guard deployments and immigration enforcement in Washington, Memphis and New Orleans. Trump said Friday that crime was down 71% in Memphis, 75% in New Orleans and 81% in Washington. Those city percentages are administration figures; they are not the FBI’s national rates.

Criminologists told FactCheck.org the causes of a national drop this size are “myriad and unclear.” Extra officers in a few cities can change local counts. They do not by themselves explain an 18% national murder decline covering about 96% of the population through more than 17,000 agencies. Changes in reporting, hospital survival, the fading of the pandemic spike and ordinary cyclical decline all sit in the same spreadsheet.

Preliminary 2026 numbers keep falling. The White House cited first-half figures of violent crime down another 10.6% and murder down 23% from the same period in 2025. The Council on Criminal Justice’s mid-year city sample found homicides 18% lower in the first six months of 2026 than in the first half of 2025, 31% below 2019 and 51% below the recent peak around 2022. The FBI, in an unusual midyear note attached to the annual book, also said the slide was continuing.

What the official record now supports is this: 2025 produced the largest one-year drop in the FBI’s violent-crime and murder rates since national estimates started in the 1930s; the murder rate of 4.1 per 100,000 matches the bureau’s 1955–56 floor; independent researchers using longer mortality series say 2025 may be the lowest homicide year since 1900; and 2026 city samples point lower still. What the record does not settle is how much of that belongs to any single presidency, or whether “the crime rate” — a phrase that mixes murder, robbery, rape, assault and sometimes property crime — is literally the lowest in 125 years.

Trump is using the peak year of a multiyear decline as proof of a completed project. The tables show a country far safer than 2020 and safer than most of the last half-century. They also show a drop that began while he was out of office and accelerated on his watch. Both sentences can be printed next to the same 4.1.