Around this time every year, the FBI releases its national crime statistics analysis, known as the Uniform Crime Report, which offers policymakers and the public a fairly comprehensive review of criminal trends across the United States. The latest data, fortunately, paints a very encouraging picture. The Washington Post reported:
Violent crime and murder rates across the United States fell sharply between 2024 and 2025, according to FBI data, the largest year-to-year decrease since the federal government began tracking nationwide crime rates in 1936.
The 2025 murder rate of 4.1 killings per 100,000 residents is the lowest the country has seen since the mid-1950s, the agency said.
To the surprise of no one, Donald Trump and his Republican allies wasted no time in taking credit for the development, which the president exaggerated — and this despite the inconvenient fact that the encouraging trend in the crime rate began before Trump returned to the White House for his second term.
But stepping back, there’s room for a larger conversation about the crime data and partisan asymmetry.
According to the FBI, there was a spike in crime rates toward the end of Trump’s first term, although national data showed improvements throughout Joe Biden’s presidency.
In 2023 (the third year of Biden’s term), crime rates in the U.S. declined significantly, reaching generational lows; and in 2024, the picture of public safety trends looked even better.
Republicans could have celebrated the good news at the time, but they preferred to brazenly lie to the public.
In September 2024, for example, as early voting got underway in some states, candidate Trump said anyone who believed the evidence pointing to lower crime rates had “a serious brain problem.” A week later, the Republican (himself a convicted felon) added that crime rates were “through the roof,” adding that “only a stupid person” would accept evidence showing the opposite.
Around the same time, as crime rates fell, Trump told a Michigan audience, “You can’t walk across the street to get a loaf of bread. You get shot, you get mugged, you get raped.”
He had plenty of company. Republican Sen. Tim Scott of South Carolina similarly told a national television audience during the campaign that Americans were confronting “a wave of violent crime that we have not seen literally in five decades.” Then-House Republican Conference Chair Elise Stefanik condemned what she called Biden’s “violent crime crisis.”
House Speaker Mike Johnson made similar comments, declaring, “We can’t survive the dramatic increases in violence, crime and drugs that the Democrats’ policies have brought upon our communities.”
These GOP voices simply turned reality on its head. To be sure, we know why they were all lying — if Americans were scared of crime, the argument went, they might be more likely to vote for Republicans — but that didn’t make their campaign of deception any less offensive.
Indeed, the lying continued even after voters had cast their ballots. As recently as four months ago, FBI Director Kash Patel appeared on Fox News and condemned “the explosion of crime under the Biden administration,” which Trump was “thankfully” able to “tamp down.”
Patel was certainly in a position to know better — he ostensibly leads the FBI, which collects and reports on the nation’s crime data — but the former podcast personality nevertheless pointed to an “explosion of crime” that simply never happened.
Meanwhile, there was no comparable Democratic response to the bureau’s Uniform Crime Report last week. It’s not as if the public saw House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries or Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer trying to convince Americans that only idiots would believe the FBI’s statistics and that the public should fear Trump’s “violent crime crisis.”
Instead, Democrats simply accepted the good news and moved on.
The resulting dynamic is familiar but instructive. When crime rates fall during a Democratic administration, Republicans refuse to accept the data, but when crime rates fall during a GOP administration, both parties accept the data without incident.
This post updates our related earlier coverage.
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