US poised to end 2025 with the largest one-year drop in homicides ever recorded

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This year began with a deadly New Year's Day car-ramming terrorist attack in New Orleans and is finishing with a flurry of horrific shootings, including a mass shooting at Brown University, but 2025 is also poised to end with the largest one-year drop in U.S. homicides ever recorded, according to data from cities both large and small.

Based on a sampling of preliminary crime statistics from 550 U.S. law enforcement agencies, the year is expected to end with a roughly 20% decrease in homicides nationwide, Jeff Asher, a national crime analyst, told ABC News.

"So, even taking a conservative view, let's say its 17% or 16%, you're still looking at the largest one-year drop ever recorded in 2025," said Asher, co-founder of AH Datalytics and a former crime analyst for the CIA and the New Orleans Police Department.

Experts say crime levels appear "back to normal" after a pandemic surge.

The dramatic drop in homicides surpasses a 15% decline in 2024, which was then the largest decrease on record, according to Asher. In 2023, the number of homicides across the country fell 13% and 6% in 2022, according to the FBI.

The number of homicides nationwide is expected to be the lowest since the FBI began keeping such records in 1960, Asher said.

Asher said his assessment is based on the Real-Time Crime Index, which he founded and is a collection of monthly crime data from 550 law enforcement agencies nationwide.

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"You've got places like Detroit, Philadelphia and Baltimore that are on track to have the fewest murders since the 1960s. New Orleans, in spite of the terrorist attack on January 1, is on pace to have the fewest murders since 1970," Asher said. "San Francisco is on track to see the fewest number of murders since 1940."

Homicides in Chicago are down 30% this year from 2024, according to crime statistics from the Chicago Police Department (CPD). The number of homicides this year is down 49% since 2021, when the city recorded nearly 800 homicides, the CPD data shows.

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