Over the last two years, a quiet miracle has been playing out across the United States: People are killing each other far less often.

Murder and other types of violent crime spiked across the country in 2020, when the pandemic closed down schools and recreation centers and the police murder of George Floyd fueled a collapse in community trust in policing. Violent crime stayed high for the next two years.

But murders fell by about 12 percent in 2023 — the largest drop ever recorded in federal crime statistics — and may have declined even further in 2024. Federal data for the year has yet to be released, but murders likely fell around 14 percent in 2024, according to data compiled by the Real Time Crime Index. This year, they’re down roughly 20 percent. Jeff Asher, a crime analyst who helps run the index, said 2025 is on track to have the lowest murder rate since 1960, when the FBI began keeping reliable records.

One of the most remarkable examples of this trend is Baltimore, Maryland, which in the first six months of this year has had its fewest homicides in five decades.

Baltimore, like many other cities in the US, received a massive influx of federal funding in 2021 from the American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA). In the last few years, the funding paid for things like new recreation centers and street lights in high-crime areas. At the same time, the Biden administration distributed billions in grants to nonprofit violence reduction groups.

That funding, Asher told Vox’s Today, Explained podcast,........

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