Feb. 25, 2026, 3:18 p.m. ET
President Donald Trump touted the nation’s declining crime rate at his marathon State of the Union address, celebrating the “big success” of his deployment of National Guard troops into American cities.
Trump said he inherited a nation beset by “rampant crime” when he took office in 2025, but his administration has since achieved a “turnaround for the ages.”
Violent crime has generally been falling in the United States since reaching a peak in the 1990s. Violence surged during the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic at the tail end of Trump’s first term, but began to recede while President Joe Biden was in office.
“I’m not sure I’d agree quite with the framing,” Jeff Asher, co-founder of the data analytics firm AH Datalytics, said of Trump’s statements on crime. “And a lot of the comments are, I’d say, imprecise and probably lack the context of what was happening in terms of the nation’s crime trends really since 2023.”
Murder rate is expected to decline
Trump said “the murder rate saw its single largest decline in recorded history” in 2025. “The lowest number in over 125 years — year 1900,” Trump said.
A January report from the Council on Criminal Justice found that the number of homicides in 35 large U.S. cities declined 21% from 2024 to 2025.
If a similar decline is recorded in forthcoming FBI data, the homicide rate for the country as a whole in 2025 will have dropped to about 4 per 100,000 residents, which would be both the largest percentage drop in homicides in a single year and the lowest homicide rate recorded since 1900.
Whether the murder rate hit this historic low can’t be confirmed until the FBI releases its data, according to Adam Gelb, president and CEO of the Council on Criminal Justice. Though it’s “hardly surprising” that Trump took credit for the decline, the drivers of the trend “defy easy explanation,” Gelb said.
“We’re seeing big shifts in criminal justice policies and programs, big advances in crime fighting technologies and big social, economic and cultural shifts happening,” all of which could be contributing, Gelb said.
Were National Guard deployments a ‘big success’?
Trump said he deployed the National Guard and federal law enforcement “to restore law and order to our most dangerous cities,” resulting in “big success” in Memphis, Tennessee and New Orleans.
The Memphis Safe Task Force, made up of the National Guard and a dozen federal agencies, arrived in the city in late September at Trump’s direction. The city’s “safer communities dashboard” shows a decline in the number of crimes began in the summer, falling from 3,640 in July to 1,687 so far in February.
Asher said an argument could be made that the presence of federal law enforcement helped contribute to the already sharp drop in Memphis, but “certainly not New Orleans. 100% no.”
Like many other cities, New Orleans, where Asher is based, saw declines in crime in 2025. Officials recently celebrated the city’s homicide rate hitting the lowest level in 50 years.
“None of that decline was related to a small National Guard deployment in the French Quarter, where very little of our crime happens,” Asher said.
Is there ‘almost no crime anymore’ in Washington, DC?
Trump also made specific claims about Washington, DC, where he deployed the National Guard to combat crime in August, saying the city has “almost no crime anymore.”
“In fact, crime in Washington is now at the lowest level ever recorded and murders in DC this January were down close to 100 percent from a year ago,” Trump said.
Total violent crime in the District fell to the lowest level seen in over 30 years in 2024, officials announced. The number of violent crimes fell about 28% in 2025, according to data published by the Metropolitan Police Department. There have been 290 violent crime incidents so far in 2026.
There were 10 homicides in the city in January 2025 and two in January 2026, according to the police data, which is an 80% decrease. The most recent data shows that homicides are down 63% compared to this time last year.
Asher has said the department’s website may have overstated the decline in violent crime when compared to the data reported to the FBI, but the trend is likely occurring. But it’s not entirely clear what’s causing this decline, he said.
“It’s really hard to parse out any effect of the federal deployment in DC, necessarily, because it is a city that was already seeing really strong declines,” Asher said.