Murder rates drop for third year in a row as Trump complains nation is ‘breaking down’
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Rates of violent crime also dropped, by nearly 3.3 percent in 2024 from 2023, data shows. The number of murders is expected to drop for the third year in a row — despite President-elect Donald Trump railing that the nation is suffering from high crime rates.
![[A black flag with white lettering lies on the ground rolled up behind a pickup truck that a man drove into a crowd on Bourbon Street in New Orleans, killing and injuring a number of people, early New Year’s Day.]](https://static.independent.co.uk/2025/01/02/23/New_Orleans_Car_into_Crowd_Driver_63107.jpg)
Although Trump declared in a Truth Social post Thursday that the U.S. is “breaking down” with violence, blaming the current administration’s “open borders,” data shows that rates of violent crime and murder actually plummeted in 2024. Data from the Real-Time Crime Index from January through October 2024, collected from over 300 law enforcement agencies across the country, reveals that murder rates have dropped by nearly 16 percent from 2023 and by nearly 25 percent from 2022 in the same periods. Overall violent crime also dropped by 3.3 percent in 2024 from 2023, according to the index.
Although there is still more data from the end of the year to be accounted for, experts predict that these trends will persist. This positive news comes amid a string of recent high-profile murder cases, including the killing of the UnitedHealthcare CEO in New York City, the woman fatally set ablaze on the subway, and the driver who fatally plowed into a New Orleans crowd on New Year’s Day.
In the wake of the New Orleans attack, which left 14 dead and dozens of others injured, many online — and even Fox News — speculated that the suspect was a migrant, but the FBI identified the driver as Shamsud Din Jabbar, a U.S. citizen from Texas.
