The Trump administration said its aggressive crime-fighting agenda was responsible for the historic lows in homicides recorded by major cities throughout the country.
The White House said President Trump’s messaging about tackling violence and disorder, such as deploying federal law enforcement and the National Guard into the District — and offering similar deployments to other cities — had brought crime to its lowest level since the early 20th century.
“Thanks to President Trump’s law-and-order agenda, crime across the country has plummeted to the lowest level in more than 100 years,” White House spokeswoman Abigail Jackson told The Washington Times in a statement.
“President Trump is getting dangerous criminals off the streets, deporting criminal illegal aliens, and is embracing our heroic law enforcement officers like never before. Democrats’ soft-on-crime policies hurt the American people for years. President Trump is undoing that damage,” Ms. Jackson said.
The Council on Criminal Justice earlier this year said 2025 was likely on track to have a national homicide rate of 4 per 100,000 residents. That rate, which will not be official until the FBI releases its annual report on national crime trends this fall, would be the lowest documented homicide rate in law enforcement or public health data going back to 1900.
The decline in homicides was even more pronounced at the midway point of this year, with leaders in New York City and Baltimore announcing record drops.
Other authorities across the country noted their cities had reported the lowest levels of violent crime in more than half a century.
New York Police Department Commissioner Jessica Tisch said the 122 homicides logged through the first six months of the year were well under the city’s previous record of 136 recorded in 2017.
Baltimore Mayor Brandon Scott noted that the 50 homicides tallied in his city through July 1 marked the fewest ever recorded at the city’s midway point. Baltimore is quickly distancing itself from a long-held reputation as one of the most violent cities in the nation.
“We are making progress on public safety that many thought was impossible,” the Democratic mayor said in a statement.
Mr. Scott credited the Baltimore Police Department, the Baltimore State’s Attorney’s Office, the Mayor’s Office of Neighborhood Safety and Engagement and resident buy-in for making strides against violence in the city.
“We know that our work is not done; one life lost to violence in our city is one too many,” the mayor said. “But after decades of losing hundreds of friends, family members and loved ones to gun violence every year, we are finally seeing sustained reductions in shootings and homicides and building the safer, healthier neighborhoods our residents deserve.”
According to police department records, Baltimore had a 23% decline in homicides compared with the first half of 2025. That marked a stark turnaround from the pandemic emergency era, when the city routinely surpassed 150 homicides by the midway point from 2019 through 2022. The downward trajectory began accelerating in 2024, when midyear killings dropped below 100 for the first time in a decade.
In New York City, authorities said the historic decline in killings matched record lows in shooting victims and shooting incidents.
The 381 gunshot victims were down from the previous low of 397 in 2025, the NYPD said, and the 322 shooting incidents beat the former record of 337 shooting incidents set in 2018 and matched in 2025.
Police said those improvements were driven by a pronounced drop in crime in the Bronx, which is down 12% year-over-year, and in the city’s public housing complexes, with the nine homicides, 51 shooting victims and 49 shooting incidents through July 1 all representing historic lows.
“New York City’s public safety progress is the result of precision policing and the extraordinary work of the men and women of the NYPD,” Commissioner Tisch said. “They are going after the guns, taking down violent gangs, building the cases, making the arrests, and working foot posts that help keep neighborhoods safe.”
The two East Coast cities join others across the country with sharp crime declines.
New Orleans officials said the city counted 38 homicides through June 25, a 24% decrease from the 50 that police had documented during the same stretch last year.
The Times-Picayune reported that, if current trends hold, New Orleans is on pace to finish the year with about 78 homicides — nearly matching the 76 recorded in 1969.
“Our crime trends are still dramatically going down. And we’re continuing our full-court press,” New Orleans Police Superintendent Anne Kirkpatrick told the newspaper. “We know our strategies are working, and I hope there’s a day we don’t have any gun violence in this city.”
The Louisiana National Guard has been stationed in New Orleans since the beginning of the year to help local law enforcement quell the violence.
New Orleans was designated the nation’s murder capital in 2022 after the city was overwhelmed with 266 killings.
Like many other major cities, New Orleans fell into a public safety crisis following nationwide protests against police brutality over the death of George Floyd, a Black man, in Minneapolis in 2020.
