Last summer, a protester in Seattle made an anti-police sign with an unusual message. Hey SPD, it read. Crime is down 20 percent, and you had nothing to do with it.
The taunt was glib, but it hinted at a profound question about the nature of public safety in American cities. After a pandemic-era rise in murders commonly attributed to a lack of policing, Seattle recorded fewer homicides in 2025 than in 2019, despite a much-smaller police force. If less policing made crime go up following the George Floyd protests—and most people thought it did—then what has made it go down?
What happened in Seattle is happening even more dramatically across the country, as America experiences a once-in-a-lifetime improvement in public safety despite a police-staffing crisis. In August, the FBI released its final data for 2024, which showed that America’s violent-crime rate fell to its lowest level since 1969, led by a nearly 15 percent decrease in homicide—the steepest annual drop ever recorded.
Preliminary 2025 numbers look even better. The crime analyst Jeff Asher has concluded that the national murder rate through October 2025 fell by almost 20 percent—and all other major crimes declined as well. The post-pandemic crime wave has receded, and then some. According to Asher’s analysis, Detroit, San Francisco, Chicago, Newark, and a handful of other big cities recorded their lowest murder rates since the 1950s and ’60s. “Our cities are as safe as they’ve ever been in the history of the country,” Patrick Sharkey, a sociologist at Princeton who studies urban violence, told me.
[Read: The good news about crime]
Few experts endorse the idea that the police “had nothing to do with it,” as the Seattle protester claimed, but the link between the number of cops and the number of crimes seems hazier than ever. The low point in violent crime has arrived even though large police departments employed 6 percent fewer officers going into 2025 than they did at the beginning of 2020, according to a survey by the Police Executive Research Forum. Though they were mostly not in fact defunded, police forces were rocked by retirements and departures. New Orleans lost nearly a quarter of its officers in the years after the pandemic—and then recorded its lowest homicide rate since the 1970s in 2025. Philadelphia had its lowest per-capita police staffing since 1985—and just clocked its lowest murder rate since 1966.
There are many plausible explanations for the recent crime downturn: sharper policing strategy, more police overtime, low unemployment, the lure of digital life, the post-pandemic return to normalcy. Each of these surely played a role. But only one theory can match the decline in its scope and scale: that the massive, post-pandemic investment in local governments deployed during the Biden administration, particularly through the American Rescue Plan Act, delivered a huge boost to the infrastructure and services of American communities—including those that suffered most from violent crime. That spending may be responsible for our current pax urbana.
Naturally, every local leader likes to say that their police department is making the difference. But in this case, every happy family is not alike: Police staffing and strategy vary widely from place to place, so an exceptional local police chief can hardly explain gains that are so widespread. “What has changed nationally is a huge investment by the federal government in prevention in response to the COVID epidemic,” John Roman, a criminal-justice researcher who heads NORC’s Center on Public Safety and Justice at the University of Chicago, told me. He credits ARPA with sending billions to local governments to use as they saw fit, and defines prevention in the broadest possible sense. “Investing in education, police, librarians, community centers, social workers, local nonprofits. Local-government employment rolls increased almost perfectly inverse to the crime rate.”
One of the most impressive turnarounds has occurred in Baltimore, which has cut homicides by almost 60 percent in the past five years, bringing the murder rate close to a 50-year low. That comes despite a historically understaffed Baltimore Police Department. “In our heyday we had 3,100 police officers, and in 2015, we had 3,000. Now we have 2,080,” the city’s police commissioner, Richard Worley, told me. “We’re still 500 officers short of where we’re supposed to be.”
Mayor Brandon Scott, who has presided over the decline in violence, praises the police but notes that police alone can be neither credited nor blamed for crime trends. “The difference of approach here is, I do not and the city does not subscribe to the thinking that only the women and men of the Baltimore Police Department are responsible for reducing violence in our city,” he told me.
City leaders and observers alike have celebrated Baltimore’s new Mayor’s Office of Neighborhood Safety and Engagement, which received $37 million in ARPA money from the city and works with police, schools, hospitals, and nonprofits. “ARPA allowed Mayor Scott to build out a brand-new agency that didn’t exist before,” Stefanie Mavronis, who directs the office, told me. “We knew it was a one-time investment, and we had to demonstrate to the Baltimore public that we should be funding this.”
Mavronis’s office supervises the city’s Group Violence Reduction Strategy, which conducts direct outreach to a narrow band of people caught in the cycle of retaliatory killings. People it identifies as likely to perpetrate crimes receive letters from Mayor Scott, offering access to city services. He has sent 450 of these “custom notifications,” and 336 people have taken him up on the offer. My colleague Toluse Olorunnipa wrote about that program in September. A University of Pennsylvania study credited the GVRS with reducing homicides and nonfatal shootings in the city’s dangerous Western District by a quarter.
That approach is one of scores of alternative public-safety ideas that were funded through ARPA. Cook County, home of Chicago and the nation’s second-largest county, put roughly $36 million into efforts such as Healing Hurt People Chicago, a trauma-recovery program for crime victims. Mecklenburg County, home of Charlotte, North Carolina, used ARPA to fund a “youth peace summit” and advertise a gun-lock-distribution program. Some ARPA money also bolstered police and sheriff’s departments directly.
All that funding combined, however, represents just a small slice of the local-government stimulus delivered through the bill. According to a National League of Cities database that covers $65 billion in local ARPA grants to 19,000 projects, public safety made up less than 9 percent of the investment—less money than was spent on traditional public health, housing, infrastructure, community aid, or government operations.
Baltimore is a case in point: The explicit violence-prevention work at GVRS ($37 million) gets a lot of attention, but the city spent nearly twice that amount in federal dollars on public space and parks ($67 million) and $192 million on housing. Baltimore spent nearly $15 million hiring community members “to clean and maintain public spaces in historically disinvested neighborhoods.” The city’s renaissance, the mayor says, is not just about a new approach to public safety—it’s also about building new swimming pools and creating summer jobs for teenagers. Summer jobs for teens, blight reduction, and green spaces have all been linked to lower crime rates. Nationally, the largest category of ARPA spending, according to the NLC database, was in “government operations”—funding local services and putting people back to work.
The idea that widespread public stimulus could cause crime to fall might mesh with a theory of its COVID-era rise put forth by researchers at the Brookings Institution. Violence may have been amplified by post–George Floyd policing changes, Rohit Acharya and Rhett Morris suggest, but it was rooted in school closures and job loss. “Cities where more teen boys and young men were pushed out of school and out of work in low-income neighborhoods during March and April [of 2020], generally had greater increases in murder from May to December,” they conclude.
ARPA (and its little brother, the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act) also helped police departments be more effective in their work, in spite or even because of their staffing challenges. Memphis Mayor Paul Young says his city has used technology, nonprofit partnerships, and an ARPA-launched group-violence reduction initiative to help supplement a police force that had its lowest staffing in 20 years in 2025, letting police focus on police work. The result: Murders, assaults, robberies, and carjackings all fell by more than 20 percent last year. (That decline was under way well before President Trump deployed the National Guard, the mayor notes.)
Another possibility is that trust is finally improving between local police and the people they serve. In Baltimore, Commissioner Worley said, the force has experienced a culture change since the federal consent decree imposed after the 2015 killing of Freddie Gray. “We went from a warrior mentality to a guardian mentality,” he said, noting that crime-stopper tips went up 32 percent from 2024 to 2025—a sign that more Baltimoreans trust the police. And the police, in turn, are solving a lot more crimes than they used to. Staffing isn’t everything.
[Jill Leovy: America is having a showboater moment]
Other factors may have contributed, but cannot explain the magnitude of the shift on their own. The Trump administration claimed last summer that crime had fallen thanks to its pursuit of “violent criminal illegal aliens,” though that does nothing to explain the record-setting numbers from 2024. Society may be healing from the pandemic—reflected in falling rates of overdoses, suicides, and traffic accidents—but that doesn’t answer why Americans are less likely to get killed now than before we all learned what an N95 was. Digital entertainment may be keeping kids off the streets, but social media has also accelerated deadly disputes. Technology may be solving crimes, but even established policing tech sometimes turns out not to matter in crime prevention.
The public likely has an easier time understanding the direct and highly visible role that police play in deterrence and arrests, in contrast to the hidden work of anti-violence nonprofits, to say nothing of the more diffuse benefits of a blight-reduction fund or a new HVAC system at the library. “Mayors are always going to credit the quality of their police for doing good work and lowering crime,” Matt Tuerk, the mayor of Allentown, Pennsylvania, told me—after, of course, crediting the quality of his police for doing good work and lowering crime. Tuerk says that Allentown has seen homicides fall from 17 in 2023 to four in 2024 and five in 2025, the lowest numbers since the 1980s. “But there are so many factors that influence those crime statistics—parademic-response time, jobs programs, conflict-resolution techniques at violence-interrupter organizations, investments in neighborhood conditions. A thousand fathers for that victory of crime reduction.”
These hypotheses are about to be put to a test. Police staffing is recovering in many cities, and police funding remains as much a political priority as ever, but the last of the ARPA grants will be spent this year, forcing cities to make choices about which programs to fund and which to eliminate. Many “alternative” public-safety grants have already been cut by the Trump administration, leaving recipients such as schools and community organizations in the lurch. It’s as if the national gravity pulling down crime rates will suddenly evaporate, Roman, at the University of Chicago, suggested, revealing the weight of local choices. Baltimore is working on a post-ARPA plan to make sure its public-health approach to policing can be supported by the city’s general fund, but not every investment of the Biden years can be sustained.
For now, the new, less violent moment means relief and opportunity for the country’s most dangerous neighborhoods. “When violence falls, city life opens up, and the most disadvantaged communities benefit the most,” Sharkey said. “There is new investment, families take part in public life, kids are allowed to be out in parks. It just changes the nature of city life in a fundamental way.” But the calm is precarious. To keep it, we will have to figure out what made it possible in the first place.
