Crime plummeted in the U.S. in 2025 after a steady but less-precipitous decline in 2024. Not only is the scary rise in violence that began early in the COVID-19 pandemic now receding in the rearview mirror, but population-adjusted rates of some crimes — murder and burglary, notably — are approaching levels not seen in more than half a century, if ever.

Yes, the historical view on murder is less impressive when you consider the vast improvement in medical care over the decades. Burglars and perpetrators of other traditional property crimes are to some extent just being supplanted by online crooks. And it’s hard to get too excited about recent declines in shoplifting given that the deodorant is now behind lock and key at the local Walgreens. But overall, the crime drop is pretty great. If only we knew why it was happening.

I exaggerate a little. There seems to be a reasonably clear line from the social disruptions caused by the pandemic and the outrage and protests in response to George Floyd’s murder by a Minneapolis police officer in May 2020 to the subsequent rise in violent crime and the fading effects of those events probably explain much of the drop. They don’t really explain the size of last year’s decline, though.

What does? U.S. President Donald Trump’s deportation campaign was the biggest development in U.S. law enforcement in 2025 and it’s plausible that it is reducing reported crime although not necessarily for the reasons you might think. An even more important development, though, may be that the young men disproportionately responsible for crime are now too preoccupied with their phones and other electronic devices to bother.

Before I get to all that, some numbers. The semiofficial national crime statistics from the FBI won’t be out for months, but recently released compilations of local crime data from the Real-Time Crime Index and Council on Criminal Justice show that the decline in crime that started in 2022 or thereabouts (different crimes had much different trajectories) accelerated........

© The Japan Times