What shaped perception and realities of crime in America
Disappearing data. Sweeping cuts to federal justice grants. A historic drop in homicide. 2025 was an undeniably tumultuous year on the nation’s criminal justice landscape. As an incoming presidential administration imposed its vision with vigor, policymakers, practitioners, researchers and advocates adjusted to new realities, and communities long plagued with high rates of violent crime cautiously celebrated a continuing decline.
Channeling DJ Casey Kasem’s famous “American Top 40,” we count down the top five developments that captured the most attention and held the greatest implications for future criminal justice policy and practice — and take some peeks at what 2026 may bring.
5. Data about crime and justice came under attack.
Beginning in January, the Trump administration and its Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) took thousands of federal data sources offline or altered or eliminated them outright. The casualties included a database on police officer misconduct and statistics on racial and ethnic disparities in the juvenile justice system. The credibility of law enforcement statistics also came under fire, particularly in New York City, Chicago and other communities where falling crime numbers conflicted with the Trump administration’s portrait of urban dystopia.
Nowhere was this skepticism more visible than in Washington, D.C. Amid resistance to President Donald Trump’s deployment of 2,000 National Guard troops to the nation’s capital, congressional Republicans challenged reports of a decline in violent crime in the District and accused police commanders of manipulating data by downgrading violent incidents to lesser offenses — even while other data from D.C. hospital emergency rooms were showing similar declines in shootings. The police chief denied tampering with the numbers but resigned.
Historically, concerns over accurate and timely data have kept researchers and academics up at night but captured little public notice. In 2025, however, data reliability took center stage, in part because of the president’s firing of the Bureau of Labor Statistics director over what he perceived as poor job growth numbers.
Public officials, reporters and other stakeholders should scrutinize obscure statistical systems and processes; shining a light on them would tend to spark improvements. But undermining trust in the fundamental credibility and accuracy of the nation’s data systems — systems that are the envy of the world — has consequences that can harm law enforcement agencies and public safety. Perhaps when (and if) the numbers in 2025 and 2026 tell a positive story, the inevitable partisan clashes will focus more on crime strategies than on the soundness of the statistics.
4. Criminal justice funding was on the chopping block.
As part of an unprecedented push by DOGE to slash federal spending, the Department of Justice (DOJ) in April canceled grants initially valued at about $820 million to a wide range of law enforcement, violence intervention, juvenile justice and other programs. Coming in the middle of budget cycles, the cuts actually eliminated some $500 million in program dollars, causing large-scale layoffs and forcing some agencies to close. Organizations providing training and technical assistance to the field were hit particularly hard, while money spent on data collection for research studies and other partially completed projects turned into pointless investments, as work stopped midstream. On a human level, not only did the cuts disrupt the lives and careers of thousands of dedicated frontline crime-prevention and -intervention staff, they removed these professionals from working with at-risk youth on the nation’s streets.
Almost no one would argue that federal justice programs are universally efficient or that some of the funded programs simply weren’t producing sufficient results. Indeed, many inside and outside of the criminal justice ecosystem believe it has become too sprawling and could use a round of streamlining and consolidation.
But aside from targeting grants that contained triggering buzzwords like “gender,” the administration’s cuts appeared to lack a clearly defined public safety strategy. An appeals process is now underway, though a new head of the DOJ’s grantmaking agency, the Office of Justice Programs, has yet to be nominated. While the cuts caused significant setbacks for many crime and justice workers and their organizations, 2026 may bring the restoration of some grant funding, as challenges have led to a reversal of several grant eliminations. On Jan. 14, the Department of Health and Human Services cut $2 billion in funding for mental health and addiction services (to some 2,000 programs nationwide) only to reverse those cuts a mere 24 hours later in the face of bipartisan outcry from lawmakers and the public. The severed slate of justice programs is unlikely to be revived en masse, but the stronger ones, especially those with patrons on Capitol Hill, have a decent shot.
3. The postpandemic justice system reboot made strong headway.
In 2025, courts made substantial progress on the massive backlogs caused by widespread system shutdown and disruption during the pandemic. In-person trials became the norm again, case processing times shortened, pretrial systems stabilized, supervision agencies normalized operations, and reentry programming and service delivery gained momentum.
Police ranks continued to bounce back as well, recovering from hits inflicted during the pandemic and the George Floyd-related protests of 2020. There’s still a long way to go — recruitment and retention are a big challenge for many departments. The correctional workforce also shrank during the early COVID-19 years, and while some gains have been made, staffing levels there remain down.
The flip side of unclogging the justice system’s pipes meant more people made it through the process to jail or prison. The revived postpandemic system ticked up the incarcerated population in 2023 after 15 years of decline.
Surely, the long-term consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic on the criminal justice system and criminal justice policy will take time to play out. And with so much volatility in the system, and crime and arrests trending down, it’s hard to predict what’s in store for the incarceration rate in 2026. But in one of the most interesting pieces last year, Keith Humphreys of Stanford University estimated that the prison population will “fall off a cliff” over the next decade, driven down by declining rates of juvenile crime.
2. Public perceptions of crime did not align with the data.
With high-profile incidents of political violence, National Guard troops deployed to cities and dramatic footage of ICE enforcement actions flooding screens everywhere, 2025 gave Americans ample opportunity to think about crime — and some surveys showed public anxiety about it on the rise. Despite data showing overall crime numbers falling, political rhetoric often implied it was spiraling upward, and subway killings, other random violence and street-level disorder kept many people on edge.
As a general rule, the disconnect between perceptions and reality when it comes to crime trends is complicated and cause for concern. If people form views of crime and criminals from sloppy news stories and social media feeds, or proclamations by agenda-driven lawmakers, poor policy — and the vilification of certain groups of people — can result.
Nowhere is this more evident than with respect to the belief that immigrants are responsible for a wildly disproportionate share of crime and violence in America. Two decades of research — using different samples, different methodologies and different units of analysis (city-level macrodata and individual-level microdata) — show that immigrants, including undocumented immigrants, commit less crime than native-born Americans. And despite popular assumptions, that finding does not reflect under- or overreporting of crime among immigrants. A recent New York Times analysis shows that most immigrants arrested in recent national, statewide and citywide crackdowns (including those in Washington, D.C., and Los Angeles) do not have a criminal record here.
This does not mean, of course, that immigrants don’t commit crimes or that removing those who are dangerous won’t improve community safety. It does mean that the right question for public policy is how to target the violent repeat offenders, secure our borders and deter illegal immigration without causing widespread panic, tearing families apart unnecessarily and creating conflicts between citizens and law enforcement that end fatally, as happened with the Minneapolis shootings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti. Failing to do so will further erode public trust in the legitimacy of law enforcement and American government.
1. Homicide likely fell to a historic low.
The violent crime drop underway in the U.S. is not only real, but it is large and extends across geographical boundaries and city sizes. Continuing a trend that started two years after the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, the 2025 decline includes a staggering estimated 20% drop in homicide nationwide, with some cities experiencing their lowest number of murders since the 1960s.
These trends are consistent across multiple crime indexes, police data sources and organizations that use a combination of FBI and local agency numbers, including the Council on Criminal Justice (CCJ), the Real-Time Crime Index and the NORC Crime Tracker.
New York City in particular recorded one of its smallest yearly murder totals on record. As of Dec. 31, 2025, the city of more than 8 million people had recorded 307 murders, a decrease of 86% from the 2,245 killings logged in 1990 and of 33% since 2020 (when there were 462 murders).
Theories about what’s driving the drop and credit-taking claims are abundant, but, at this point, there’s scarce evidence to back up any single explanation. We do have some strong suspects, though, as explored in the latest CCJ report and an expert roundtable that followed. Chief among them are changes in criminal justice policy and practice (including a combination of more targeted and proactive law enforcement and scaling of community violence intervention programs), advances in crime-fighting technologies (especially the proliferation of integrated surveillance systems) and shifts in society and culture (including declining alcohol consumption and youth spending more time home alone).
We still don’t fully understand what powered the great crime drop that began in the 1990s and especially in the years after the height of the pandemic, so divining what’s behind the trends of the last three years is a tall order. But that is all the more reason to double down on rigorous, independent research. Because when it comes to public safety and justice, we need more hard evidence and less guesswork.