Crime in the U.S. is down. Why?

filing crime in the United States is way down, and President Trump says it's thanks to him. Together we're showing what is possible when you finally have a president in the White House who supports our police, who lets you do your jobs, and who always backs the blue. We back the blue. But is it really that simple? It's the MPR Politics Podcast. I'm Miles Parks. I cover voting. I'm Ryan Lucas. I cover the Justice Department. And I'm Tamer Keith. I cover politics. So Ryan, let's just jump right into these numbers about 2025. What do they tell us about crime and the state of things right now? So look, the FBI just released in the past week or so. It's crime statistics for 2025. Data collected from 17,000 plus law enforcement agencies across country covers a population of around 329 million. So this is a good picture of America. Yeah, exactly. A good picture of what crime in the US looks like. And the numbers, as you said, show crime really across the board is way down. The violent crime rate according to these FBI statistics in 2025 dropped 9.3% murder, non-negligent manslaughter. That was down 18%. Property crime was down 12%. Robbery down 18%. Motor vehicle theft. We saw a lot of motor vehicle theft in the past couple of years. That was down more than 20%. So all of these big issue kind of crime headlines that we track, all of those numbers are dropping. And look, these numbers are consistent across the board in the sense that violent crime is down in big cities. It's down in medium-sized cities, small cities, towns. That goes for property crime as well. So it's one of these things. It's not just people who live in urban areas who are feeling this. It is Americans across the country living in town cities of all sizes. Can you put that in a broader context? I hear the year-over-year number, but I guess bigger picture, where are we at in terms of crime compared to decades ago, or just kind of give us a little bit bigger picture. So zoom me out to a 20-year perspective, because this is one thing that the FBI report does and the way that they've collected statistics over the years has kind of changed. But we can do a 20-year comparison pretty well. And according to that, the murder rate of 2025 is the lowest that we have seen in the past 20 years. It did spike, and people will remember this because a lot of people who listen, I'm sure, can think back to 2020, 2021, 22. The murder rate did spike across the country. It went up. And then it dropped, though, in 2023, 2024, and 2025. And this is a really important point about these numbers here, is that the numbers that we're seeing drop last year is a continuation of a trend that we've seen since about 2023. Tam, I feel like it's good news for all of us that there are less people getting murdered and less crimes being committed generally, but it's also especially good news for Republicans who campaigned on this in 2024, and then got back into power, and then we've seen these really low numbers. And don't worry, the president is going to take credit. He has already, and we can expect this to be a big part of his campaign message as he campaigns for vulnerable Republicans in the midterms. I was talking to a White House official today who said, you know, at the end of his speeches, President Trump has these lines where he's like, "Make America wealthy again. Make America this again. Make America that again." And when he says, "Make America safe again," that is a big applause line. So this is something that has been part of President Trump's political brand. I mean, going back to the 1980s, and so having good numbers means he is going to talk about those good numbers. And the other thing I'll just note is that the White House sees this as bigger than simply these crime statistics, though they're very excited about them, but they also tie that into the border being closed, and sort of a broader public safety message that they want to get credit for. Well, and to be perfectly clear, this is a message that as someone who covers the Justice Department, that we hear from Justice Department officials, whether it be Attorney General Todd Blanche, or FBI Director Cash Patel, one thing that when they are speaking publicly that they love to talk about is the action that they say they are taking to try to curb violent crime. And these are numbers that they can point to, and do. And we certainly, as Tammy said, the President points to them to try to back up their argument that they've had a lot to do with it. Yeah, and that clip of tape you played was from Arali, the President held essentially to boast about the new numbers. And you know, you can't see it on the podcast, but his backdrop, all the people on the bleachers behind him that make up the backdrop, it was all police officers in uniform. Yeah, I feel like on one hand, it is very classic Trump, too. I mean, he takes wins whenever he can get them, right? I mean, he just knows how to take a win, but at the same time, I also feel like any politician in his position would be celebrating these crime numbers and taking credit for them, right? And so I guess I'm just trying to understand Ryan, what evidence is there? Or is there evidence, I guess, to link specific policies that the Trump administration put into place with these drops? Look, one thing that people who study crime will tell you is that it's really hard to attribute to any specific thing to pinpoint what caused a drop of murder or violent crime or a drop in car theft. Because for one thing, crime is local. Crime is not a national thing. Crime is largely driven by local factors and the factors in Phoenix, Arizona are going to be different than in Kansas City, than in Minneapolis, than in small town Tennessee. And that's something that's really important to remember. And the way that people experience crime is also going to be different. So it's really basically impossible to say what caused crime to go up 60 years ago, five years ago. There are a couple of things that certainly criminologists think factored in. The pandemic was a tricky time for a lot of people. But it's also really hard to say in a short time frame like this with 2023 to 2026 to say what's causing crime to go down. So it's one of those things that people want an answer and I understand why people want an answer. But it's really hard to pin point one, two or three things that would be the cause for that, which doesn't mean that President Trump isn't going to say, well, look, I sent the National Guard into Washington, DC. Yesterday, I was looking out the window here from the office and I could see them walking down the street. They were four of them walking down the street. You see it all the time here. They sent National Guard into Memphis, Tennessee. Did the murder rate and the violent crime rate drop in those two cities? Yes. Is it because of the National Guard there? We can't say it was just because of the National Guard. Well, talk sticking on the specific cities. One of the things I noticed and that's been reported on in the couple days since these numbers came out is that the broad numbers are down. But when President Trump announced him, he did over exaggerate the rate in some of these individual cities that's been widely reported. He was saying that there it's down 80, 90 percent in some of these places. I guess I wonder, Tam, from your perspective, when you talk about numbers like this, does that matter? I guess does it undercut any of his points when he does this sort of exaggerating that he's known to do on all sorts of issues? Trump and numbers have always been an untethered situation on numbers related to just about anything. What I will say is that generally speaking, voters are giving him some credit on the issue of crime. He is deeply underwater on everything from immigration to the economy. His approval rating is in the 30s if he's lucky on these things. Well, when it comes to crime, his approval rating is in the 40s, which means he's only a little bit underwater on crime. It's one of his strongest areas. Certainly, part of that is because he tells the story again and again and again and again. People feel viscerally arising crime when they feel unsafe. It's how one perceives security in one's own neighborhood, street, block, what have you. There was certainly a time from conversations in Washington DC where people felt when crime was up and how one perceives it almost matters more than the actual numbers themselves. I say that because yes, crime went up in 2020, 2021, 2022. The crime rates were still way below the crime rates of the 1990s. But the thing is crime had been so low for a period of time in the teens that it felt like there was a huge jump in crime that crime was really high. When you speak to criminologists about this, those perceptions matter because people don't sit here and say as they go outside and they're worried about being on their on their own sidewalks, whether well, hey, you know, 30 years ago, 40 years ago, crime was worse. So I'm not going to be that concerned about it. No, it's what they are comparing back to, which would be a couple of years before when they felt safer. All right, let's leave it there. We're going to take a quick break and more on how this is going to impact the midterms in just a moment. And we're back. So, Tam, we've talked a bit about how President Trump is perceiving this and using these numbers to his advantage. But obviously, we talk about this a lot. He's not on the ballot this year. I'm wondering how our candidates or our candidates going to be mentioning these crime numbers ahead of the midterms. I went into the database of campaign ads that's maintained by ad impact. They're a tracking firm and there are a lot of ads. ads about crime. A lot of ads in particular, I'll just point us to the state of North Carolina, where there is a Senate race between the former Democratic governor, Roy Cooper and the former chairman of the RNC, Michael Wattley, the Republican, and all the top ads running in that race relate to crime. It's pretty remarkable. Here's a little bit from an outside group that's supporting Wattley. Roy Cooper's been in politics 40 years and we are paying the price. Roy Cooper also has ads where he is proactively saying, I'm good on crime, I am tough. As our attorney general, Roy Cooper locked up violent criminals, sex predators, and drug traffickers. Crime may not be on the top of everybody's minds as voters start thinking about the midterms. But, you know, from the perspective of somebody who doesn't cover politics, but sees ads on television, like there are drug price ads. There's a policy ad about agriculture, a policy ad about those don't land in the same sort of way that a visceral ad about crime does and about safety because everybody is affected by basic security questions in a way that they don't think about kind of dry agricultural policy or drug prices or something like that. Well, it makes so much sense to me, Tam, that Republican candidates specifically will be focusing on this issue exactly for what you mentioned, which is that it's not like Republican candidates are going to go out there and say, you know what we want to talk about is inflation or we want to talk about the Iran war. These are issues where President Trump is deeply unpopular. So I feel like crime, if crime is the policy issue that he is least unpopular or has the lowest level of disapproval on, it makes sense to me that Republican candidates especially would want to be talking about this. I will sound like a little bit of a broken record here, but the thing that a campaign needs to do is to disqualify the other guy. If we take this North Carolina Senate race, Roy Cooper's approval is actually pretty high. Voters across the spectrum, more or less approve of him. He's been elected statewide multiple times. Michael Watley needs to disqualify him. And how does he disqualify him? Well, they're going hard on the message that Roy Cooper is soft on crime, that you are in danger because of decisions that Roy Cooper made when he was governor. So it is absolutely key to this. Ryan talks about sort of the visceral feeling of these ads. I'll just add that there is a recent study that is based on a whole bunch of polling of working class voters who make up something like 50 percent of the electorate. And working class voters rank economic issues very high like everyone does, but they also rank personal safety. They care a lot about personal safety. They care a lot more about personal safety than say, you know, college educated economic elites care about personal safety. And so this is a threshold issue for a lot of voters and Republicans have been able to use it as a wedge to separate those voters from from Democrats who have had a message on crime at times that that seems a little dismissive of those concerns. Is that wedge as effective in 2026, though, as it was in 2024? I'm thinking back to what you just said, Ryan, about how so much of this stuff is this visceral feeling of whether people feel unsafe or feel safe, right? And I can understand why this would be more effective when it's just a couple of years removed from this big crime spike, but every year that goes by that these numbers keep going down. I guess I wonder whether this message gets a little bit less effective. As Ryan said earlier, there is a difference between seeing the numbers and feeling the numbers. And if you turn on a local newscast on any given day, you're going to see some story about some terrible violent crime that happened. And so even if the numbers are great, it may not feel that way based on what you're seeing. What is leading the news? Yeah, I mean, I don't think it's controversial to say the last two years for Republicans have been winning the sort of messaging battle on crime. Where do Democrats go from here, I think that there is a broad acknowledgement, except in maybe the furthest left corners of the party. There's a broad acknowledgement that there was some overreach in the 2020-2021 time span. The defund the police messaging. It turns out it is not a message that most Democrats want to have any association with anymore. Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio Cortez the other day in an interview said, "Woke one was crazy." I think that Democrats are trying to figure out ways to talk about these issues, both pushing back on Republican narratives, but also not seeming dismissive while they do. That's a challenging needle to thread that I think is certainly a work in progress for Democrats. But the reality is most messaging that we are going to hear from Democrats for the next several months and several years is economy economy economy. I was talking to someone from one of the Democratic super PACs trying to get Democrats elected who said, "Yep, that is the issue. That is the only issue. That is what voters care about and that is what you're going to hear Democrats talking about." All right, we can leave it there for today. Come back tomorrow for a weekly roundup. I'm Miles Parks. I cover voting. I'm Ryan Lucas. And I'm Tamar Keith. I cover politics. And thank you for listening to the MCR Politics podcast.