WASHINGTON, D.C. – The first quarter of 2025 has shown a significant decline in national crime rates, according to an analytical report by Jeff Asher of Jeff-alytics.
However, the reports note that Year-To-Date (YTD) data is often unreliable until later into the year, explaining, “YTD frequently reflects something that happened last year rather than telling you what’s happening now. Think of it like a scoreboard of now rather than a forecast of the future.”
Additionally, this form of analysis, the Jeff-alytics report states, comes with three key disclaimers.
First, early-year crime data such as 2025’s January-February are typically initially underreported, possibly affecting comparisons to completed 2024 January-February data.
Second, current trends in data are not representative of the rest of the year, as trends can shift significantly as the other months of data come in.
Third, not all crimes are reported and there is always a possibility of outlier cities that are contrary to the overall trend.
Nonetheless, the Jeff-alytics report believes YTD is representative of broader developing trends especially when using data from multiple sources.
And so, in analyzing the 2025 January-February crime rates in the U.S., the report reveals a “very large, across-the-board, decline in crime nationally that is worth wider awareness,” noting the data was taken from the Real-Time Crime Index (RTCI) that includes more than 380 agencies covering 96.8 million people.
Particularly, property crime count dropped 16 percent, motor vehicle theft count dropped 30 percent, violent crime count dropped 14 percent, murder and robbery count dropped 21 percent, said Asher.
In response to these numbers, Asher said he is skeptical, especially when seeing how crime reporting has been declining over the past years.
To see if these statistics truly hold value, the report reviewed more current crime data through mid-April from big cities via reports by 27 city police departments.
In doing so, the report found that in the 20 cities with available murder and violent crime data, murder count dropped 23 percent and violent crime count dropped 14 percent. In the 27 cities with available shooting data, shootings count dropped 27 percent.
Lastly, taking available data up to mid-April of 2025 from the Gun Violence Archive (GVA), the report found a 17 percent drop in shooting victims compared to the same timeframe in 2024.
Similarly, the report pulled further data from the GVA, which is known not to underreport, and found that murder is down 21 percent compared to 2024. All of this data aligns with the RTCI trends, verifying the positive statistics that Asher questioned.
As Asher writes, “The crime trends through the first few months of 2025 are incredibly encouraging and backed up by the RTCI, aggregated data from individual cities, shooting data from individual cities, and the Gun Violence Archive.”
Looking deeper, Asher concludes these trends aren’t “all that surprising,” noting similar drops in crime rate have happened in 2023 and 2024. Asher adds the cause of these trends are highly complex and rapid deviations are typically rare.
However, as tensions and uncertainty rises in America’s economy, politics and society, Asher suggests a possibility of rare rapid deviations this year.
