Last summer a protester in Seattle held up a sign addressed to the police department: “hey spd, crime is down 20 percent, and you had nothing to do with it.” It was, the Atlantic concedes, a glib taunt. It was also accurate in the awkward way that sparks a real argument. Seattle recorded fewer homicides in 2025 than in 2019 despite a much smaller police force, which poses a question that neither side of America’s policing debate is fully dressed for: if less policing after the George Floyd protests made crime go up — and most people thought it did — then what has made it go down?
Because down it has gone. The FBI’s final 2024 data, released in August, put the violent-crime rate at its lowest level since 1969, with homicides down nearly 15 percent — the steepest single-year drop ever recorded. Preliminary 2025 numbers are better still: crime analyst Jeff Asher calculates the national murder rate through October 2025 fell almost 20 percent, with every other major crime declining too. Detroit, San Francisco, Chicago and Newark posted 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 Princeton sociologist, told the Atlantic.
Now here is the part that refuses to flatter anyone. Large police departments employed 6 percent fewer officers going into 2025 than at the start of 2020, according to a Police Executive Research Forum survey — forces shrunk not by defunding, mostly, but by retirements and resignations. New Orleans lost nearly a quarter of its officers and then recorded its lowest homicide rate since the 1970s. Philadelphia had its lowest per-capita police staffing since 1985 and just clocked its lowest murder rate since 1966. If officer headcount drove crime, the charts are printing their lines in the wrong direction.
Give the money to the city and see what happens
The candidate explanations are a familiar buffet: smarter policing strategy, more overtime, low unemployment, screens absorbing the young, post-pandemic normalcy. Each probably contributed. But the Atlantic argues only one theory matches the scale: the enormous post-pandemic federal investment in local government, above all the American Rescue Plan Act. The logic is that police staffing and strategy vary wildly from city to city, so no exceptional local chief explains gains this uniform. “What has changed nationally is a huge investment by the federal government in prevention in response to the COVID epidemic,” John Roman, who heads NORC’s Center on Public Safety and Justice at the University of Chicago, told the magazine. “Local-government employment rolls increased almost perfectly inverse to the crime rate.”
Baltimore is the showpiece: homicides down almost 60 percent in five years, near a 50-year low, with a historically understaffed force. “In our heyday we had 3,100 police officers, and in 2015, we had 3,000. Now we have 2,080,” police commissioner Richard Worley told the Atlantic. The city’s Mayor’s Office of Neighborhood Safety and Engagement got $37 million in ARPA money and runs the Group Violence Reduction Strategy, which mails letters from Mayor Brandon Scott to people identified as likely to shoot someone — 450 “custom notifications” so far, with 336 recipients taking up the offer of services. A University of Pennsylvania study credited the program with cutting homicides and nonfatal shootings in the Western District by a quarter. “We knew it was a one-time investment, and we had to demonstrate to the Baltimore public that we should be funding this,” said the office’s director, Stefanie Mavronis.
Similar sprinklings went everywhere: Cook County put roughly $36 million into efforts like Healing Hurt People Chicago, a trauma program for crime victims; Mecklenburg County funded a “youth peace summit” and advertised gun locks. But look at the denominator. A National League of Cities database covering $65 billion in local ARPA grants across 19,000 projects shows public safety took less than 9 percent — less than public health, housing, infrastructure, community aid or plain government operations. Baltimore itself spent $67 million in federal money on parks and public spaces, $192 million on housing and nearly $15 million hiring residents to clean historically disinvested neighborhoods, against that $37 million for violence prevention. The largest single category nationally was “government operations,” which is to say paying people to work.
That pairs neatly with a theory of why crime rose in the first place. Rohit Acharya and Rhett Morris of the Brookings Institution argue the 2020 violence spike may have been amplified by post-Floyd policing changes but was rooted in school closures and job loss: cities where more young men were pushed out of school and work in March and April 2020 saw bigger murder increases that May through December. Imagine the labor market theory of homicide: idle teenagers are a leading indicator, and swimming pools and summer jobs are the correction. Nobody will hold a sign about that at a protest. It doesn’t fit on the cardboard.