The nationwide homicide rate has fallen to the “lowest it has been in modern history,” FBI Director Kash Patel said this week.
While official FBI data for 2025 is scheduled to be released in December, Patel offered a positive preview of the statistics in a Wednesday interview with the Epoch Times.
“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. “This FBI is going to be releasing murder rates in December, which is the lowest it has been in modern history, by double digits.”
Patel’s claim appears to check out, according to crime data experts. Jeff Asher, a former analyst for the Department of War (DOW) and Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), predicted in September that the FBI “will likely report the lowest murder rate it has ever recorded when the Reported Crime in the U.S. for 2025 comes out in the second half of 2026.”
The U.S. murder rate was about 5 per 100,000 in 2024, and it is “down around 20 percent so far this year” without much time left for that trend to “change dramatically,” Asher explained on his Substack blog, noting that the trend started in 2023 and has been “remarkably persistent.”
In August, the FBI released statistics revealing that the 2024 rates of murder and non-negligent manslaughter showed a nationwide decrease of 14.9 percent compared to the previous year.
As the Epoch Times reported on the data, “Approximately 17,000 people were murdered in the United States in 2024, representing a drop of about 15 percent from the prior year but an increase of nearly 7 percent from 2015.”
“We are over double the amount of arrests of violent offenders this calendar year, and we still have December to go,” Patel said.
When he took over as head of the bureau, approximately 12,000 of its nearly 37,000 agents were stationed in the Washington, D.C. area.
“I felt that the FBI workforce was too concentrated in what we call the national capital region,” he said, explaining that he reassigned agents to areas spread out across the country to bring more resources to field offices.
“The results speak for themselves. We’re going to keep pushing as hard as we can,” he continued, before saying he does not worry about the establishment media’s narrative about how the FBI is running.
Citing a “cultural change” that has been “well received by the field,” Patel told the outlet that his personnel are “the only audience I care about.”
“I don’t care about what the media thinks and how they falsely report that we are debilitating our functions as an FBI,” he said.
Olivia Rondeau is a politics reporter for Breitbart News based in Washington, DC. Find her on X/Twitter and Instagram.
