US violent crime could hit lowest rate ‘since the moon landing’ in 2025

America saw some of its lowest overall crime rates in more than half a century in 2024, according to the FBI’s annual crime report published Tuesday. The numbers are so significant that one crime data analyst suggested that the U.S. could see its lowest violent crime rate since the moon landing in 1969 if the trend continues through 2025.  

Of course, there have been crime spikes, particularly in the 1990s and during the waning years of the COVID-19 pandemic. However, crime has largely been trending downward since 2022, despite how most Americans feel about crime in the nation. 

The FBI’s analysis relies on voluntary reporting from law enforcement agencies across the country. Participation was up 2.1% compared to 2023, totaling roughly 96% of agencies nationwide and a population of more than 325 million people.

The report also notes that, as of 2024, every city agency serving a population of more than 1 million residents contributed a full year’s worth of data to the FBI’s reporting. That includes Los Angeles, which had stopped reporting its crime metrics at the federal level following a change to how those numbers were collected in 2021.

Violent crime, property crime and hate crime drop

The FBI’s Unified Crime Report for 2024 suggests that violent crime was down 4.5%, as property crime and hate crime fell by 8.1% and 1.5%, respectively. That’s according to self-reported data from 19,328 law enforcement agencies nationwide.

In June, crime data analyst Jeff Asher wrote that as of the first half of 2025, “The US is on track to record a substantially lower violent crime rate than every year since the moon landing,” adding, “the nation’s reported property crime rate should be much lower than any property crime rate ever recorded even if you’re conservative in just how much you think it’s falling.”

In the FBI report, violent crime includes murder and nonnegligent manslaughter, which fell by 14.9%, as well as rape, robbery, and aggravated assault, which saw respective declines of 5.2%, 8.9% and 3%. Property crime, meanwhile, accounts for burglary (-8.6%), larceny-theft (-5.5%) and motor vehicle theft (-18.6%).

‘Promising but not surprising’

Speaking to CBS News, Ernesto Lopez, research specialist at the Council on Criminal Justice, described the statistics as “promising but not surprising.”

“After significant increases in violent crime starting in 2020, the decline in all major crime types across all sizes of jurisdictions is promising,” said Lopez. “These trends are closely aligned with our own findings, which show crime falling last year and continuing to fall in the first six months of 2025.”

However, it’s worth noting that not all crimes are reported to the police, meaning crime statistics are only as reliable as the data available to each agency. For instance, previous FBI estimates suggest that a smaller percentage of robbery victimizations in 2023, compared to 2022, were reported to police.

Asher points to other “caveats” as well, including the fact that we’re only halfway through 2025, that underreporting can “make the drops seem larger than they are,” declines aren’t occurring in every jurisdiction in the country, and that projections are inherently “imprecise.” 

Nevertheless, Asher writes that “with all that in mind, it’s definitely plausible — likely even — that the US in 2025 will report the lowest murder and property crime rates ever recorded to go along with the lowest violent crime in more than 55 years.”