The number of murders is expected to drop for the third year in a row — despite President-elect Donald Trump railing that the nation is suffering from high crime rates.
Although Trump declared in a Truth Social post Thursday that the U.S. is “breaking down” with violence, blaming the current administration’s “open borders,” data shows that rates of violent crime and murder actually plummeted in 2024.
Data from the Real-Time Crime Index from January through October 2024, collected from over 300 law enforcement agencies across the country, reveals that murder rates have dropped by nearly 16 percent from 2023 and by nearly 25 percent from 2022 in the same periods. Overall violent crime also dropped by 3.3 percent in 2024 from 2023, according to the index.
Although there is still more data from the end of the year to be accounted for, experts predict that these trends will persist.
“Considering where we were just three or four years ago (soon after Trump’s stint in the White House), we’re basically looking at 5,000 fewer murder victims than in 2020, 2021 and 2022 having occurred in 2024,” Jeff Asher, co-founder of AH Datalytics and a former crime analyst for the CIA and the New Orleans Police Department, told ABC News.
This positive news comes amid a string of recent high-profile murder cases, including the killing of the UnitedHealthcare CEO in New York City, the woman fatally set ablaze on the subway, and the driver who fatally plowed into a New Orleans crowd on New Year’s Day.
In the wake of the New Orleans attack, which left 14 dead and dozens of others injured, many online — and even Fox News — speculated that the suspect was a migrant, but the FBI identified the driver as Shamsud Din Jabbar, a U.S. citizen from Texas.
Still, the president-elect linked the mass murder to immigration. On Wednesday in the hours after the attack, Trump wrote on Truth Social: “When I said that the criminals coming in are far worse than the criminals we have in our country, that statement was constantly refuted by Democrats and the Fake News Media, but it turned out to be true. The crime rate in our country is at a level that nobody has ever seen before.”
On Thursday, he also blamed immigration when claiming the country is “breaking down.”
“Our Country is a disaster, a laughing stock all over the World! This is what happens when you have OPEN BORDERS, with weak, ineffective, and virtually nonexistent leadership,” the 78-year-old Republican wrote. “The USA is breaking down - A violent erosion of Safety, National Security, and Democracy is taking place all across our Nation.”
Jabbar was killed after exchanging gunfire with police, the FBI have said. The federal agency is investigating the incident as an “act of terrorism” and noted that the suspect had been carrying an ISIS flag.
Trump alluded to these details in a separate post on Thursday, once again placing blame the Biden administration’s immigration policies. Throughout his 2024 campaign, Trump has made unsubstantiated claims about the nation’s crime rate, at one point claiming that the “crime wave” going on at levels “nobody has ever seen before,” which is not supported by data.
He wrote: “With the Biden ‘Open Border’s Policy’ I said, many times during Rallies, and elsewhere, that Radical Islamic Terrorism, and other forms of violent crime, will become so bad in America that it will become hard to even imagine or believe. That time has come, only worse than ever imagined.”
Statistics show that immigrant crime rates are consistently lower than those of American citizens.
