The 2020 Murder Spike Is Officially Over

On Tuesday, the FBI released its annual update on American crime trends, estimated from police department reports covering 2024. The big headline: America’s murder rate stood at five per 100,000 last year. This was well below its 2020–21 surge of around 6.5, a 15 percent decrease from 2023, and even a touch below the 2019 rate.

The murder spike that began in 2020 is officially over.

Homicides will still need to fall by a bit more than 10 percent to reach the historically low rate of 4.4 murders per 100,000 we experienced in 2014. And they just might. The Real-Time Crime Index, for example, which compiles monthly reports from many bigger cities (reporting them as a 12-month rolling total), shows a continuous decline from mid-2022 through May of this year. Jeff Asher, co-founder of the firm behind the index, thinks it “more likely than not” that 2025 will have the lowest American murder rate since we started keeping decent statistics.

At the city level, different places have experienced different trends since 2020 (as I outlined in a recent Manhattan Institute brief), but the consistent feature today is that murder rates are falling fast. Comparing the years ending in May 2022 and May 2025, the RTCI has murders down roughly a quarter in New York and Detroit, down a third in Los Angeles and Chicago, and down by half in Baltimore and New Orleans.

Another notable case is Memphis, which experienced a dramatic second surge in homicides in early 2023, immediately following the police beating death of Tyre Nichols. Yet even there, murders have fallen about a fifth below their mid-2022 level.

There’s considerable debate over what caused the 2020 crime spike, but it certainly had something to do with the confluence of tragedies that befell the country that year: the pandemic, the George Floyd civil unrest, and the widespread depolicing caused by both. Numerous studies show that policing reduces crime, and that high-profile, controversial police killings cause, at minimum, local crime increases. It was reasonable to expect that violence would decline as those forces receded, though it’s frustrating that it took several years to happen.

From here, though, the big question is whether we will continue to see the homicide rate fall, or if it will level off or even rise again. Some historical context may be helpful. The U.S. murder rate plummeted in the 1990s, fluctuated a bit through most of the 2000s, and then enjoyed a more moderate decline until 2015, another time when police killings took the national spotlight. Several years of rising murder rates were followed by a modest turnaround—until 2020.

As my colleague Charles Fain Lehman has pointed out, it’s possible to see America’s major murder trends as a combination of structural and policy factors. Structural factors—such as an aging population and improving surveillance technology, including ubiquitous mobile phones—have likely suppressed murder rates in recent decades. But policy factors are fickler. Improved policing and increased incarceration contributed to the 1990s crime decline. Over the past decade, meantime, anarchy and depolicing in the wake of viral incidents punctuated the downward trend with abrupt spikes that then slowly faded out (which Lehman dubs a “Ferguson cycle,” drawing on the “Ferguson effect” popularized by another colleague of ours, Heather Mac Donald).

For now, police activity has rallied, and calls to defund law enforcement are falling on deaf ears. The U.S. population is still getting older. But police departments across the country face a recruiting crisis, too. And there’s always the chance that another police killing will grab the attention of the media and the public, setting a new Ferguson cycle in motion.

The 2020 murder spike is finally, officially over. Let’s hope the decline continues.

Photo by Brad Vest/Getty Images