The FBI’s annual crime report for 2024 has refuted Donald Trump’s repeated assertions that a violent crime wave swept the United States under President Joe Biden. The data, released on Tuesday, shows a 4.5% decline in violent crime nationwide compared with 2023, with murders falling by 14.5%.
The report records that every category of violent crime decreased last year. Rapes dropped by 5.2%, aggravated assaults by 3%, and robberies by 8.9%. Murder rates in cities with populations over one million saw a 19.1% decline, the steepest fall of any crime category.
Trump had campaigned on claims that Democratic ‘soft-on-crime’ policies fuelled an unprecedented crime surge. In May 2024, he told reporters in Manhattan that people were being ‘mugged and killed’ outside the courthouse, despite data showing crime falling even in New York. The FBI figures contradict his narrative, with national violent and property crime rates now at levels not seen since the 1960s.
Crime analyst Jeff Asher noted that the murder rate in 2024 was 26% lower than in 2020 and ‘roughly even’ with pre-pandemic figures. He predicted that 2025 will ‘more likely than not’ see the lowest murder rate ever recorded. However, he cautioned that the FBI’s data relies on voluntary submissions from over 16,000 law enforcement agencies, so under-reporting remains an issue.
The report also recorded 11,679 hate crime incidents in 2024, a slight decrease from 2023, but the Arab American Institute urged caution, citing chronic under-reporting. A concerning trend was the 10-year high in assaults on law enforcement officers, totalling 85,730, while 64 officers were killed feloniously in the line of duty last year.
