Crime Has Plummeted. So Why Don’t Americans Feel Safe?

In less hectic times, or ones in which good news earned as much attention as bad, it might be the biggest story of the moment. In city after city, violent crime has declined so much that it raises the possibility that the country’s murder rate this year may drop to the lowest ever recorded. The national database stretches all the way back to 1960. If those were the halcyon days, then so are these.

The president may soon opportunistically take credit — perhaps praising the effect of immigration enforcement, perhaps the return of law-and-order Republicanism — or he may see a greater opportunity in continuing to fearmonger about America’s cities, by and large blue. But most of us haven’t even clocked the improvements, with some quickly moving from worry over pandemic-era spikes in violent crime to alarm about lower-level social disorder and antisocial behavior. This should be a sign that on the most important metrics things have meaningfully improved. But the fact that so few of us feel as if we’ve entered a golden age of public safety may also teach us an important lesson about the politics of crime: that we often get them upside down.

Last year may have measured the largest murder decline in the country’s recorded history, likely breaking a record set in 2023 and making this year’s ongoing improvement on that base line even more remarkable. In Baltimore, homicides were down 23 percent between 2023 and 2024, and in the first four months of this year have dropped again, from 57 murders last year to 39. In St. Louis, the year-on-year drop was 34.5 percent; in New Orleans, 30.6 percent. In February 2025, Chicago had 35 percent fewer murders than in February 2024, according to preliminary data from its police department, and 49 percent fewer than in February 2023.

The pattern applies not just to cities with reputations for violence but also to relatively safe ones — and to metropolises both large and small: Denver, Boston, Los Angeles, Philadelphia.

And then there is San Francisco, which became the poster child of urban disorder in the aftermath of the Covid emergency, not just serving up doomer catnip to Fox News audiences but also contributing to a new reactionary politics in Silicon Valley that has since been exported to the national stage. In 2024, the murder rate in San Francisco fell by 31 percent. In more common but less reliably reported categories, the drops were similar: robbery down almost 22 percent, with assaults and burglary and arson all falling, too. So far this year, the improvements continue to be eye-popping — compared with those encouraging 2024 numbers, murders were down 23 percent through late May. Rapes are down 32 percent, after a smaller decline last year; robberies are down nearly 23 percent, burglaries 22 percent, larceny and arson by 27 and 20 percent.

These are enormous declines, and in parts of the Bay Area they are understood as vindication for the new mayor, Daniel Lurie — who won election last fall partly on promises to curb crime and drug use — and for the general rightward swing of the city’s politics in recent years. Since the pandemic, the state of California has taken a harsher approach to reducing social disorder of various forms, especially homelessness and drug use. And in April, Lurie, a moderate Democrat, took stock of his first hundred days emphasizing a decline in street encampments before the drop in crime. Friends who live there have described it to me as feeling like a whole new city; others passing through have described the improvement as “magical.” On social media, you see people wondering whether San Francisco is now “the cleanest big city in America.”