Murders Down Roughly 20% In 2025, FBI Preliminary Data Show

Authored by Kimberly Hayek via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

The FBI on Sunday published an early glimpse at annual crime data, releasing preliminary 2025 data alongside first-quarter 2026 numbers that together show that violent crime has dropped sharply.

The figures, typically released at the end of summer, marked the first time the bureau furnished a preview of annual crime tallies before the end of the following spring. 

The first-quarter 2026 numbers, drawn from 67 major law enforcement agencies, showed homicides fell 17.7 percent against the same period last year, robberies fell 20.4 percent, reported rapes declined 7.2 percent, and aggravated assaults dropped 4.8 percent. Declines appeared in every region of the country, according to the bureau. 

Among cities registering the steepest homicide reductions from January through March are Washington, D.C., down 64.7 percent; Philadelphia, 54 percent; San Diego, 50 percent; Houston, 36.4 percent; Memphis, Tennessee, 34.4 percent; New York City, 31.7 percent; and Los Angeles, 23 percent.

The 2025 full-year figures anchoring the release were equally stark.

The FBI recorded a 20 percent drop in the national murder rate, the largest single-year decrease ever captured in FBI data, alongside a 31 percent rise in fentanyl seizures, rescue of more than 6,000 child victims, and a 290 percent increase in gang disruptions. FBI Director Kash Patel told The Epoch Times that the achievements were the result of a “full-scale reset of the FBI—operationally, culturally, and fiscally.”

In 2025, FBI arrests climbed 197 percent, from 34,000 to 67,000; 1,800 gangs and criminal enterprises were dismantled—a 210 percent increase—and more than 30,000 were arrested for violent crimes, nearly double from 2024.

The U.S. homicide rate in 2025 fell 21 percent from 2024—44 percent below the 2021 pandemic peak, according to a report by the Council on Criminal Justice, which analyzed data from 40 large cities. The group projected that when the FBI finalized its annual report, the national homicide rate would stand at roughly 4.0 per 100,000 residents, the lowest recorded in law enforcement or public health data stretching back to 1900.

Patel hinted at the historic nature of the data for months.

“We are on track to have the lowest murder rate in modern American history. The lowest murder rate by double-digit percentages,” he told the Senate Judiciary Committee in September 2025.  He attributed the shift in large part to the FBI’s Operation Summer Heat, noting that in New Orleans and Nashville alone, violent crime arrests climbed an average of 250 percent each.

A month later, Patel told The Epoch Times’s Jan Jekielek that homicides had fallen by double digits nationwide. 

“I’m happy to announce, finally, that one of the big targets we had for this year, obviously, was to reduce the murder rate across America,” he said.

In October 2025, Trump and Patel announced that Operation Summer Heat resulted in more than 8,700 arrests and a 20 percent drop in violent crime in targeted cities. Trump, in a Truth Social post days later, said that since he was inaugurated, 28,000 violent criminals have been arrested, more than 6,000 illegal firearms were removed from the street, 5,000 children have been rescued, and 2,000 criminal enterprises have been disrupted—calling them “historic results.”