homicide

President Trump has threatened to deploy the National Guard to Chicago, New York, Seattle, Baltimore, San Francisco and Portland, Ore., to fight what he says is runaway crime. Yet data show most violent crime in those places and around the country has declined in recent years.

Homicides through the first six months of 2025 were down significantly compared with the same period in 2024, continuing a post-pandemic trend across the U.S.

Trump, who has already taken federal control of police in Washington, D.C., has maligned the six Democratic-run cities that all are in states that opposed him in 2024. But he hasn’t threatened sending in the Guard to any major cities in Republican-leaning states.

John Roman, a data expert who directs the Center on Public Safety & Justice at the University of Chicago, acknowledged violence in some urban neighborhoods has persisted for generations. But he said there’s no U.S. city where there “is really a crisis.”

“We’re at a remarkable moment in crime in the United States,” he said.

Public sees things differently

Trump might be tapping somewhat into public perception when he describes cities such as Chicago as a “killing field.” The vast majority of Americans, 81%, see crime as a “major problem” in large cities, according to a survey released this week by the AP-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research, though there is much less support, 32%, for federal control of police.

The public was reminded this week that shootings remain a frequent event in the U.S. In Minneapolis, which has seen homicides and most other crime fall, a shooter killed two children attending a Catholic school Mass on Wednesday and wounded 17 a day after three people died in separate shootings elsewhere in the city.

Still, over time, the picture is encouraging, according to numbers from AH Datalytics, which tracks crimes across the country using law enforcement data for its Real-Time Crime Index.

Aggravated assaults — which includes nonfatal shootings — through June were down in Chicago, Portland, Seattle, Baltimore and San Francisco and were virtually unchanged in New York. Reports of rape were up in New York and Chicago during the first half of the year, but down in the other cities, including a 51% drop in San Francisco.

The crime index also showed that property crimes, such as theft, burglary and motor vehicle theft, were mostly down in those six cities in the first six months of 2025. Theft crimes rose from 2020-24 in four of the six cities analyzed by AP.

Cities defend safety strategies

Trump exaggerated and misstated facts about crime in Washington when his administration took over the D.C. police department and flooded the capital with federal agents and the National Guard. He referred to Baltimore, 40 miles away, as a “hellhole” during a Cabinet meeting and has said he might “send in the ‘troops.’ ”

“I’m not walking in Baltimore right now,” Trump said.

Yet Baltimore has shown drops in major crime, according to the crime index. Homicides and rapes were down 25% or more in the first half of 2025 compared with the same period in 2024. Homicides were down for three consecutive years through 2024 and were 35% lower when compared with 2018.

“Deploying the National Guard for municipal policing purposes is not sustainable, scalable, constitutional, or respectful,” Maryland Gov. Wes Moore, a Democrat, said on social media site X.

Baltimore has found ways to reduce violence by offering mentorship, social services and job opportunities to young people likely to commit crimes, said Michael Scott, director of the Center for Problem-Oriented Policing at Arizona State University and a former police chief in Florida.

“That approach has resulted in more significant reductions in shootings and homicides than any other strategy I’ve seen in the over 50 years I’ve been in the field,” Scott said.

Vice President JD Vance told a Wisconsin crowd on Thursday that governors and mayors should ask the Trump administration for help.

“The president of the United States is not going out there forcing this on anybody,” Vance said of using the National Guard, “though we do think that we have the legal right to clean up America’s streets if we want to.”

Tales of different cities

Trump doesn’t seem to disparage big cities in states that favor Republicans. Charlotte, N.C., had 105 homicides in 2024 compared with 88 in 2023. The rate of vehicle thefts per 100,000 people more than doubled there from 2020-24. Indianapolis had a homicide rate of 19 per 100,000 residents in 2024 — more than four times higher than New York’s.

Amy Holt, 48, who recently moved to Charlotte from a gated community in northern Virginia, said someone tried to steal her husband’s car in their new city. She also found bullets on the ground while walking with dogs.

There’s no discussion about sending the National Guard to Charlotte. Holt believes most cities should be trusted to be in charge of public safety, adding that troops in uniforms would be “alarming” and “scary.”

Democratic-elected officials in cities targeted by Trump have publicly rejected suggestions that their residents need the National Guard. “Crime is at its lowest point in decades, visitors are coming back, and San Francisco is on the rise,” Mayor Daniel Lurie said.

Experts question just how effective the National Guard would be and where troops would be deployed in cities.

“It’s going to make residents think: Things must be much worse than I realize to have the military in my neighborhood. What’s going on?” Scott said. “It’s more likely to generate undue fear and apprehension than it will lead to perceptions of reassurance and safety.”

White and Keller write for the Associated Press. White reported from Detroit and Keller reported from Albuquerque, N.M. AP video journalist Erik Verduzco in Charlotte, N.C., contributed to this report.

As President Trump declared Washington, D.C., a crime-ridden wasteland in need of federal intervention last week and threatened similar actions in other Black-led cities, several mayors compared notes.

The president’s characterization of their cities contradicts what they began noticing last year: that they were seeing a drop in violent crime after a pandemic-era spike. In some cases the declines were monumental, due in large part to more youth engagement, gun buyback programs and community partnerships.

Now members of the African American Mayors Assn. are determined to stop Trump from burying accomplishments that they already believed were overlooked. And they’re using the administration’s unprecedented law enforcement takeover in the nation’s capital as an opportunity to disprove his narrative about some of the country’s greatest urban enclaves.

“It gives us an opportunity to say we need to amplify our voices to confront the rhetoric that crime is just running rampant around major U.S. cities. It’s just not true,” said Van Johnson, mayor of Savannah, Ga., and president of the African American Mayors Assn. “It’s not supported by any evidence or statistics whatsoever.”

Trump has deployed the first of 800 National Guard members to the nation’s capital, and at his request, the Republican governors of three states pledged hundreds more Saturday. West Virginia said it was sending 300 to 400 Guard troops, South Carolina pledged 200, and Ohio said it would send 150 in the coming days, marking a significant escalation of the federal intervention.

Beyond Washington, the Republican president is setting his sights on other cities including Baltimore, Chicago, Los Angeles and Oakland, calling them crime-ridden and “horribly run.” One thing they all have in common: They’re led by Black mayors.

“It was not lost on any member of our organization that the mayors either were Black or perceived to be Democrats,” Johnson said. “And that’s unfortunate. For mayors, we play with whoever’s on the field.”

The federal government’s actions have heightened some of the mayors’ desires to champion the strategies used to help make their cities safer.

Some places are seeing dramatic drops in crime rates

Trump argued that federal law enforcement had to step in after a prominent employee of his White House advisory team known as the Department of Government Efficiency was attacked in an attempted carjacking. He also pointed to homeless encampments, graffiti and potholes as evidence of Washington “getting worse.”

But statistics published by Washington’s Metropolitan Police contradict the president and show violent crime has dropped there since a post-pandemic-emergency peak in 2023.

Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson scoffed at Trump’s remarks, hailing the city’s “historic progress driving down homicides by more than 30% and shootings by almost 40% in the last year alone.”

Mayor Karen Bass of Los Angeles, where homicides fell 14% from 2023 to 2024, called the federal takeover in District of Columbia a performative “power grab.”

In Baltimore, officials say they have seen historic decreases in homicides and nonfatal shootings this year, and those have been on the decline since 2022, according to the city’s public safety data dashboard. Carjackings were down 20% in 2023, and other major crimes fell in 2024. Only burglaries have climbed slightly.

The lower crime rates are attributed to tackling violence with a “public health” approach, city officials say. In 2021, under Mayor Brandon Scott, Baltimore created a Comprehensive Violence Prevention Plan that called for more investment in community violence intervention, more services for crime victims and other initiatives.

Scott accused Trump of exploiting crime as a “wedge issue and dog whistle” rather than caring about curbing violence.

“He has actively undermined efforts that are making a difference saving lives in cities across the country in favor of militarized policing of Black communities,” Scott said via email.

The Democratic mayor pointed out that the Justice Department has slashed more than $1 million in funding this year that would have gone toward community anti-violence measures. He vowed to keep on making headway regardless.

“We will continue to closely work with our regional federal law enforcement agencies, who have been great partners, and will do everything in our power to continue the progress despite the roadblocks this administration attempts to implement,” Scott said.

Oakland officials this month touted significant decreases in crime in the first half of this year compared with the same period in 2024, including a 21% drop in homicides and a 29% decrease in all violent crime, according to the midyear report by the Major Cities Chiefs Assn. Officials credited collaborations with community organizations and crisis response services through the city’s Department of Violence Prevention, established in 2017.

“These results show that we’re on the right track,” Mayor Barbara Lee said at a news conference. “We’re going to keep building on this progress with the same comprehensive approach that got us here.”

After the president gave his assessment of Oakland last week, Lee, a steadfast Trump antagonist during her years in Congress, rejected it as “fearmongering.”

Social justice advocates agree that crime has gone down and say Trump is perpetuating exaggerated perceptions that have long plagued Oakland.

Nicole Lee, executive director of Urban Peace Movement, an Oakland-based organization that focuses on empowering communities of color and young people through initiatives such as leadership training and assistance to victims of gun violence, said much credit for the gains on lower crime rates is due to community groups.

“We really want to acknowledge all of the hard work that our network of community partners and community organizations have been doing over the past couple of years coming out of the pandemic to really create real community safety,” Lee said. “The things we are doing are working.”

She worries that an intervention by military troops would undermine that progress.

“It creates kind of an environment of fear in our community,” she said.

Patrols and youth curfews

In Washington, agents from multiple federal agencies, National Guard members and even the United States Park Police have been seen performing law enforcement duties including patrolling the National Mall and questioning people parked illegally.

Pentagon Press Secretary Kingsley Wilson said the National Guard troops will not be armed, but he declined to elaborate on their assignments to safety patrols and beautification efforts.

Savannah’s Johnson said he is all for partnering with the federal government, but troops on city streets is not what he envisioned. Instead, he said, cities need federal assistance for things like multistate investigation and fighting problems such as gun trafficking and cybercrime.

“I’m a former law enforcement officer. There is a different skill set that is used for municipal law enforcement agencies than the military,” Johnson said.

There has also been speculation that federal intervention could entail curfews for young people.

But that would do more harm, Lee said, disproportionately affecting young people of color and wrongfully assuming that youths are the main instigators of violence.

“If you’re a young person, basically you can be cited, criminalized, simply for being outside after certain hours,” she said. “Not only does that not solve anything in regard to violence and crime, it puts young people in the crosshairs of the criminal justice system.”

A game of wait-and-see

For now, Johnson said, the mayors are closely watching their counterpart in Washington, Muriel Bowser, to see how she navigates the unprecedented federal intervention. She has been walking a fine line between critiquing and cooperating since Trump’s takeover, but things ramped up Friday when officials sued to block the administration’s naming its Drug Enforcement Administration chief as an “emergency” head of the police force. The administration soon backed away from that move.

Johnson praised Bowser for carrying on with dignity and grace.

“Black mayors are resilient. We are intrinsically children of struggle,” Johnson said. “We learn to adapt quickly, and I believe that we will and we are.”

Tang writes for the Associated Press.

Homicides across Los Angeles fell by more than 20% in the first half of the year, leaving the city on pace to end 2025 with its lowest total for that crime category in nearly 60 years, according to an LAPD tally.

Although violent crime persists in parts of the city, homicides overall in L.A. have dropped to 116 through June 28, the most recent date for which reliable data were available, compared to 152 in the same period last year.

Homicides have been on a steady downward trajectory since 2021, when total killings eclipsed 400 amid the tumult of the COVID-19 pandemic. The falling homicide rate in the years since mirrors a national trend, with Baltimore, Detroit and other major cities recording similar declines.

Experts say the country may be in the midst of the sharpest decline in killings in history — one that can’t be attributed to any single factor.

“What we’re seeing is a broader trend that goes over several years,” said Charis Kubrin, a professor of criminology, law and society at UC Irvine. “We’re seeing homicide rates go down all across the United States.”

The Los Angeles Police Department did not release homicide data in the 1970s, but it confirmed that the recent totals are on track for the lowest annual count since at least 1968.

Cities and unincorporated areas patrolled by the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department are also recording fewer killings. Through May 31, the most recent date for which data was published, those parts of the county had recorded 58 homicides. Over last year, 184 people were killed in areas that fall under the agency’s jurisdiction, down nearly 100 from 2021.

The deflated crime numbers paint a decidedly different picture than the dystopian image of the city offered by President Trump and other senior U.S. officials as justification for the deployment of military troops in L.A. in recent weeks.

Areas in the city’s more southern neighborhoods that have historically borne the brunt of L.A.’s violent crime trends have seen some of the most impressive turnarounds.

Take the LAPD’s 77th Street Division in South Los Angeles, which in years past has logged higher homicide tallies than the entire San Fernando Valley combined. But killings there dropped from a recent high of 63 in 2021 to 38 last year. The neighboring Southeast Division, which covers Watts and surrounding communities, saw its tally decrease by more than a third in that span.

Kubrin and other researchers have long cautioned about reading too much into year-to-year crime data. She said the reasons for the improvements are likely rooted in the complicated and intertwined ways that cities have responded to the “stress, the political divisiveness and the economic downturn” since 2020.

“With all its diversity and challenges and issues, L.A. still reports lower homicide rates than other major cities,” she said.

A theory that violence dips during economic boom times gained traction after studies found that high homicide counts of the early 1990s coincided with a recession, but a similar downturn in the mid-2000s didn’t necessarily translate into more people being killed.

Conservatives point to mass tough-on-crime strategies, but Kubrin said other Western industrialized countries that lock up only a small fraction of the people as the U.S. also saw drops in crime.

The Trump administration has proposed slashing hundreds of millions in federal funding from school safety grants, youth mentoring programs and gang intervention networks, which research shows can help curb crime.

Jeff Asher, a leading expert in the field of criminology, deemed the recent period “the great murder decline,” which he attributed to “strong investment in communities from private and public sources after the shock of the pandemic.”

While the LAPD is already shrinking, some police critics continue to argue for shifting resources from the multibillion-dollar police budget to pay for programs that pull people out of poverty and provide them with stable income and housing.

LAPD Deputy Chief Alan Hamilton told The Times that beefed-up police presence on city streets in response to recent emergencies has almost certainly had a deterrent effect that reduced killings, in addition to efforts by gang interventionists and social workers.

But Hamilton, who runs the department’s detective bureau, warned that such gains could be eroded if the department continues to lose officers amid the city’s ongoing fiscal crisis. The city could also see an increase during the hot summer months when bloodshed tends to spike, he cautioned.

“Obviously we flooded the streets during the fires and during the unrest,” he said. The department’s strategy typically involves going after the small group of hardcore offenders driving most of the violence, an approach Hamilton said is paying off.

“I think we’re seeing the dividends of that, as opposed to casting a wide net,” he said.

As protesters in Los Angeles denounced United States President Donald Trump’s deportation policies, sometimes leading to clashes with law enforcement, Republican and Democratic politicians sparred over who has the bigger crime problem: blue states or red states.

California Governor Gavin Newsom, a Democrat, took to X to challenge three elected Republican officials who had offered posts critical of California and Newsom’s handling of the recent protests.

🚨JUST IN: Senator Tommy Tuberville (R-AL) calls for Governor Gavin Newsom to be arrested.

“Lock him up.”

“LA looks like a third world country — anarchists are in charge, law enforcement is being attacked, and the rule of law is nonexistent.” pic.twitter.com/v718Yau6wh

— Eric Daugherty (@EricLDaugh) June 9, 2025

• On June 9, Senator Tommy Tuberville of Alabama said Los Angeles “looks like a third world country – anarchists are in charge, law enforcement is being attacked, and the rule of law is nonexistent”. Later that day, Newsom posted: “Alabama has 3X the homicide rate of California. Its murder rate is ranked third in the entire country.”
• On June 10, Senator Markwayne Mullin of Oklahoma posted: “America is sick of illegal immigration and weak, lawless liberal leadership.” He called it “rich” that Newsom was suing Trump to reverse the president’s federalisation of California’s National Guard. Later that day, Newsom posted: “If you want to discuss violence, let’s start with your state’s murder rate – which is 40 percent higher than California’s.”
• Also on June 10, Arkansas Governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders posted: “What’s happening in California would never happen here in Arkansas because we value order over chaos.” The next day, Newsom responded, “Your homicide rate is literally DOUBLE California’s.”

Newsom’s comparisons are close to accurate because he worded his assertions carefully to refer to the homicide rate. California has more homicides than any state, but it also has by far the largest population, and using the rate – which refers to homicides per 100,000 people – makes it possible to compare states on an even footing.

Stop reporting crime then your crime rate will be lower. So convenient for you. Unfortunately for you, we know the truth. https://t.co/AoCNo0FG5f

— Libs of TikTok (@libsoftiktok) June 11, 2025

Some Newsom critics replied to his post by arguing that the numbers the governor used are unreliable because California has some of the lowest rates of reporting crimes to the FBI’s data collectors.

But this argument is a red herring: Newsom’s political office confirmed to PolitiFact that his data are from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). That means his statistics are not subject to concerns about low reporting rates (a problem that commentators have exaggerated).

California fares less well against these three states when measuring overall violent crime, which includes homicides, rapes, aggravated assaults and robberies.

What does the CDC data show?

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention publishes data showing the number of homicides per state as well as the rate of homicides per 100,000 people. The latter metric allows a comparison of bigger states to smaller states.

According to 2022 data, the latest available, Alabama ranks third in the nation for its homicide rate with 14.9 per 100,000 people. (It trails Mississippi and Louisiana and also the District of Columbia, which generally isn’t considered comparable to the 50 states because it is essentially a city rather than a state.)

Arkansas ranks sixth with a rate of 11.8 homicides per 100,000 people. Oklahoma ranks 20th with a rate of 8.3 per 100,000.

And California? It ranks 30th with a rate of 5.9 per 100,000.

Alabama’s rate is about 2.5 times higher than California’s rate; Newsom said it was triple. Oklahoma’s rate is 41 percent higher than California’s; Newsom said it was 40 percent higher. And Arkansas’s rate is double California’s, which is what Newsom said.

California’s homicide rate is lower than Alabama’s, Arkansas’s and Oklahoma’s

“The CDC data are very reliable when it comes to death and mortality data because these come directly from coroners’ records and state health departments,” said Alex R Piquero, a University of Miami criminologist and former director of the federal Bureau of Justice Statistics. “They are among the most respected of all health data collections.”

Although the CDC’s data are from 2022, the 2023 FBI data show the same general ranking pattern. The FBI collects data from law enforcement agencies rather than coroners’ offices.

In its statistics, Alabama ranked third among the 50 states with 10.3 homicides per 100,000 people. Arkansas ranked fifth with 9.4 per 100,000, and Oklahoma ranked 16th with 6.1 per 100,000. California ranked 25th with 5 per 100,000.

“There is a lot of research on the variation of homicides across states in the United States, and both the CDC and FBI show” that Newsom is generally accurate, Piquero said.

One technical note: In his posts, Newsom flipped back and forth between referring to the “homicide” rate and the “murder” rate. For the CDC data, he should have exclusively used the term “homicide” because the CDC doesn’t use the term “murder”.

What about violent crime overall?

The data on violent crime are less favourable for California.

The data the FBI collected for 2023 show that Arkansas’s violent crime rate ranked fourth among the states, about 620 incidents per 100,000 people. California ranked sixth with 508 per 100,000 people. That was higher than either Oklahoma (15th with 414 per 100,000) and Alabama (19th with 404 per 100,000).

Our ruling

Newsom said California has lower homicide rates than Alabama, Arkansas and Oklahoma.

Data for 2022 from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which criminologists consider a reliable source, show that California has a lower homicide rate than Alabama, Arkansas and Oklahoma and roughly in the proportions that Newsom said.

Data from 2023 collected by the FBI generally mirror the CDC data.

Looking at violent crime more broadly – a category that includes rape, aggravated assault and robbery in addition to homicide – California fares less well, notching rates higher than either Oklahoma and Alabama.

The statement is accurate but needs additional information, so we rate the statement Mostly True.