Finally: 2025 Homicide Statistics

The CDC's death rates by homicide for last year are now out and they dropped nearly 15% in 2025 vs. 2024.

The Centers for Disease Control collect cause-of-death statistics, including homicides. The CDC’s demographic data tends to come from funeral directors asking a few standard questions of the family, so they are less dubious than the FBI’s murder statistics collected from cops, because nobody ever gets mad at funeral directors over homicide stats. (The CDC only tracks victims of killings, while the FBI tries to make sense of local law enforcement’s data on perpetrators of murder as well as victims.)

Also, the CDC’s data seems to deal well with Hispanics, while some police departments are notorious laggards about updating their demographic categories after all these decades of having the federal Office of Management & Budget declare the existence of a Hispanic ethnicity.

But the CDC does put a 6-month lag on reporting mortality numbers for more fraught categories like homicide, suicide, and motor vehicle accidents to allow coroners time to come to a final decision. So, we only now have complete 2025 numbers for homicides.

Here’s the total homicide death rate for 1999-2025:

The homicide death rate fell almost 15% last year, and is down 35% since peaking in 2021 at the crest of Black Lives Matter getting so many black lives murdered. 2025 saw the second lowest homicide rate in the 1999-2025 era, above only 2014. (Black Lives Matter emerged in August 2014 at Ferguson, and spread the lethal Ferguson Effect in 2015-2016, then returned with a bang on May 25, 2020 with George Floyd’s expiration.)

A thumbnail history: homicide rates have been relatively stable over the last 27 years compared to the historic surge in the 1960s and the crack wars’ increase in the late 1980s-early 1990s, followed by the big drop in the Giuliani Era of the later 1990s.

The spike in 2001 was due to 9-11, which the CDC counts, not unreasonably, as homicides (although the FBI doesn’t count the ~3,000 deaths as murders).

The bursting of the Bush Housing Bubble in 2008 led to a sizable decline in homicides. Unlike in Les Miserables, hard times don’t cause modern Americans to more often murder shopkeepers to steal loaves of bread to feed their starving families. Instead, homicides in modern America tend to be Deaths of Exuberance that rise in number when people have more cash in their pockets.

Homicides stayed relatively low into 2014, but then Ferguson in August 2014 launched the first Black Lives Matter era, which caused murders to soar first in the St. Louis area, then in Baltimore, later in Chicago, and so forth.

The election of Donald Trump in late 2016 appears to have caused elite institutions to back off from promoting BLM’s war on the police quite so enthusiastically as in the late Obama years.

But sometime in mid 2019, the homicide rate stopped going down. Starting in March 2020, Covid led to releases of some jailbirds, rent moratoria and cash handouts, and the police choosing to back off getting in suspicious characters faces, where they might get coughed upon.

But, simply plotting the CDC’s weekly homicides counts (not rates, but no big difference for our purpose) shows that the historic explosion of murder occurred not with covid in March 2020, but in the 6 weeks following George Floyd’s death on May 25, 2020. American elites declared that a long-needed “racial reckoning” had finally arrived, and the police got the message that they should police blacks less.

Murders stayed around this 21st Century peak in 2020, 2021, and 2022 before a vibe shift started to be noticeable as elite enthusiasm for depolicing finally started to wane. The last huge murder spasm was the Fourth of July week in 2023.

How low can we go?

Jeff Asher’s survey of 30 major law enforcement agencies and the Gun Violence Archive tracking of gun killings show that winter 2026 was down vs. winter 2025. (Homicides are fairly seasonal. But keep in mind that winters can be variable due to some winters keeping people inside more than others.) But, Asher notes, the rate of decline might be slowing. So let’s not declare victory and go back to the woke policies that proved so catastrophic, especially for blacks, twice over the last dozen years.

What about homicide death rates by race?

The Ferguson and Floyd Effects especially stand out in the sky-high black rate for homicide deaths.

Here’s the homicide death rates for males 15-34, who no doubt commit a large fraction of murders as well as dying often by homicide:

We can graph the homicide death rate for other races/ethnicities relative to non-Hispanic whites.

Paywall here.