Criminal calculations

President Donald Trump told reporters in the Oval Office on Friday that the National Guard has done such a great job reducing crime on the streets of Washington, D.C., he will send them to Chicago and New York next.

“We haven’t had to bring in the regular military, which we’re willing to do if we have to,” he said. “And after we do this, we’ll go to another location, and we’ll make it safe, also. We’re going to make our country very safe. We’re going to make our cities very, very safe.”

Earlier this month, Trump declared a crime emergency in Washington and placed the federal government in control of police functions across the city. Federal agents and National Guard servicemembers deployed to the streets in armored vehicles and tactical gear. Agents and police officers have since arrested about 700 people, including many illegal immigrants.

Trump has long criticized what he calls out-of-control crime across the nation. While on the campaign trail last year, Trump blamed Democratic politicians for reducing police forces and allowing criminals to rule the streets. “You can’t walk across the street to get a loaf of bread. You get shot, you get mugged, you get raped, you get … whatever it may be,” he said during a speech in Detroit, Mich. More recently, Trump has pointed to high crime rates in other cities, including Los Angeles, Chicago, New York, Baltimore, and Oakland. “We’re not gonna lose our cities over this,” he said.

But according to some experts, violent crime is decreasing nationwide—and not because of Trump administration policies. Available data on crime trends in Washington and nationwide contradict much of the Trump administration’s rhetoric.

“The overall takeaway, really, when we look at homicide and other violent crimes, is that they’re declining in the first half of this year,” said Ernesto Lopez, a research specialist at the Council on Criminal Justice.

Lopez said that violence and homicide numbers jumped in 2020, largely due to social disruptions during the COVID-19 pandemic. But recent data show that increase was temporary. “We’re seeing that most crimes are falling to below pre-pandemic levels, so pre-2020 levels,” he said.

According to the group’s July report on crime trends in major U.S. cities, 11 of 13 offenses were more rare in the first half of 2025 compared to the year before. The only offenses that have remained relatively constant are certain drug crimes and incidents of domestic violence. Meanwhile, motor vehicle theft is the only offense that has increased in frequency nationwide, Lopez said.

Between 2019 and 2021—during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic—the United States saw a roughly 30% increase in murders nationwide. But numbers have been trending downward from 2022 through June of this year, according to the most recent available data, Lopez explained. For much of the United States, homicide rates in the first half of 2025 were down 14% from the first half of 2019, according to the report.

But that decrease isn’t uniform across the country. Crime has remained elevated or increased in certain cities and areas even while the rest of the country has seen a decrease. “And that’s not necessarily unexpected, because there’s always going to be variation,” Lopez said. “Whenever you’re looking at data, there’s always going to be some cities that go up and some cities that go down, and some cities have declined in homicide much sooner than other cities.”

Available evidence does not indicate that this decrease in crime had anything to do with Trump taking office, Lopez explained. “When we think of the effect of the presidency on crime, it’s very limited—if any,” Lopez said. “There wasn’t a major drop in February or March.”

Lopez said the recent data continue the downward trend since the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. “It’s hard to credit either [the Trump or Biden] administration for the declines.”

Mike Fox, a legal fellow at the Cato Institute’s Project on Criminal Justice, echoed that assessment. People don’t commit fewer crimes just because someone else is in the White House, he explained.

“You think someone’s going to go rob a bank and be like, ‘Well, now Donald Trump’s president, so I’m going to hold off?’ No, that’s just insane,” Fox said. “In D.C., it’s almost impossible to own a gun, yet crime with guns is pretty high. So that tells you that people aren’t thinking of whether or not they can legally purchase a gun before they commit a crime.”

Rather, what has likely contributed to the decrease in crimes is a host of complicated and uncertain factors, Lopez said. In some areas, many of the decreases in crime could be due to local variables such as shifting drug markets or the return of neighborhood violence prevention programs that were put on pause during the pandemic, Lopez explained.

Trump has questioned the data that show crime rates going down. On Monday, the news broke that the U.S. Department of Justice was investigating Washington’s Metropolitan Police Department for allegedly falsifying its crime statistics. Trump accused the city of being one of the most unsafe in America—and the rest of the world.

“D.C. gave fake crime numbers in order to create a false illusion of safety,” Trump wrote on his social media app Truth Social. “This is a very bad and dangerous thing to do, and they are under serious investigation for so doing!” The Department of Justice declined to comment on the investigation, and both the police department and District of Columbia Mayor Muriel Bowser did not respond to requests for comment about the investigation.

“Trust the data. The data are not perfect. There’s errors in the data, but we generally capture crime reliably well when it comes to the most serious offenses,” Lopez said. “The data generally tell the correct story of what’s happening, especially over the long term.”

And that story says that compared to previous decades—especially the ’80s and ’90s—the United States is doing well when it comes to the frequency of homicides, even when you factor in COVID-19 violence spikes, Lopez said. And unlike robberies, which someone might not report to the police, homicides are generally recorded accurately, Lopez explained.

At the end of the day, that lower homicide rate may give little reason to celebrate. “If you compare the U.S. to ourselves, we’re doing pretty good now, right?” Lopez said. “The United States still has a much higher homicide rate compared to other industrialized nations.”

The National Institutes of Health published a report in 2019 that showed the U.S. homicide rate is as much as 7 times the rate of other highly industrialized nations. The United States also has 25 times the number of firearm homicides that other high-income nations have, the report said.

And Fox from the Cato Institute says there’s another element to crime that the statistics can’t grasp—especially in Washington, D.C.

“I think it’s more relevant how you feel and what matters to you,” Fox said. “So [in] D.C., the crime rates overall are considerably lower this year than they were last year, and they [were] considerably lower last year than they were in 2023. Yet when I see that there’s routine violence in the neighborhood, I don’t necessarily feel safe, and other people don’t necessarily feel safe. So telling them that the murder rate went down … doesn’t really help when you’re witnessing homicides on the street corner.”