Violent crime drops by 4.5 percent in 2024: FBI data
The 2024 drop in violent crime follows the 3 percent drop the year before and continues a general downward trend seen since levels peaked during COVID.
The latest data also shows a year-over-year decrease across all other major crime categories.
The FBI report shows murder and non-negligent manslaughter declined by 14.9 percent in 2024, compared to the previous year; rapes declined by 5.2 percent; aggravated assault declined by 3 percent; and robbery declined by 8.9 percent.
Reported hate crimes decreased by 1.5 percent in 2024, compared to the year before.
Brian Levin — the founder of the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism and professor emeritus at California State University, San Bernardino — told The Associated Press that, despite the decline in hate crimes, last year still recorded the second highest levels in the 30 years that the center has collected data.
The report shows violent crime occurred, on average, every 25.9 seconds in 2024, while a murder occurred, on average, every 31.1 minutes; and a rape occurred, on average, every 4.1 minutes.
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Time Magazine
14 minutes ago
- Time Magazine
Trump's D.C. Distraction Is Straight Out of Summer 2020 Playbook
This article is part of The D.C. Brief, TIME's politics newsletter. Sign up here to get stories like this sent to your inbox. As he announced he was taking over Washington's police department and deploying FBI agents and 800 National Guardsmen to patrol the streets of the nation's capital, President Donald Trump on Monday seemed to gunning for a trip back to the unsettled summer of 2020 when the Covid-19 pandemic and racial justice protests set America on edge. It was an aspirational time jump for Trump, who is in search of a way out of political troubles of his own making. 'This is Liberation Day in D.C. We're going to take our capital back,' Trump said, once again defaulting to a slogan he used just months earlier to hype tariffs that have left Wall Street panicked. He vowed to purge Washington's public spaces of homeless persons, as he cast his temporary home as a hellish dystopia. 'If our capital is dirty, our whole country is dirty,' Trump said. It's impossible to ignore that Trump's latest provocative move is coming as he faces a revolt over his promise to name names in the Jeffrey Epstein sex trafficking scandal, as well as widespread frustration over unresolved wars in Gaza and Ukraine that he promised to end on Day One, an economy on the brink, and protests against his crackdown on migrants, As he appeared in a standing-room-only White House briefing room Monday morning flanked by his national security Cabinet, Trump looked to bait his critics into an uproar, hinting he would escalate to active duty military members if needed. The tableau was one designed to send the national conversation spiraling, a maximalist favorite tactic for Trump to move off a difficult moment. 'Our capital city has been overtaken by violent gangs and bloodthirsty criminals, roving mobs of wild youth, drugged-out maniacs, and homeless people,' the President said. The District's revamped police force, he said, would be empowered to do 'whatever the hell they want.' In an historic first, Attorney General Pam Bondi will immediately take command of the Metropolitan Police Department, Trump told reporters. 'Crime in D.C. is ending, and it's ending today,' Bondi said in a statement that will certainly prove inaccurate. Trump and his team described the U.S. capital as besieged by chaos, and eager to be overrun by law enforcement. 'You'll have more police, and you'll be so happy because you'll be safe when you walk down the street, you're going to see police, or you're going to see FBI agent,' Trump said in a truly stunning foreshadowing of a police state, one that he signaled 'will go further' than Washington. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said the Pentagon is ready to militarize Washington's streets, not dissimilar to what happened in Los Angeles during an aggressive show against immigration. There, Trump called up 4,000 National Guardsmen to put down protests against detentions and deportations of persons suspected to be in the country unlawfully. The capital's top prosecutor, former Fox host Jeanine Pirro, said the effort would go after 'young punks' and 'emboldened criminals' who, in her telling, terrorize residents and visitors daily. In Washington, juvenile prosecutions are currently handled by D.C. while adult cases are handled by federal officials; Pirro bemoaned that she lacked to the power to prosecute minors except in extraordinary crimes like rape or murder. Put in the most simple terms, this is a day of sheer norm-breaking distraction from Trump that has zero grounding in fact. In 2024, violent crime landed at a 30-year low, according to federal data. Violent crime is down another 26% from 2024, according to the city. Year over year, sex crimes are down 49%, robberies are down 28%, assault with a dangerous weapon is down 20%, and homicides are down 12%. Regardless, Trump put on a show that seemed aimed at not just his base but at his critics, as he seems in the market for sparring partners. And they did not disappoint. 'Donald Trump has no basis to take over the local police department. And zero credibility on the issue of law and order. Get lost,' House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries said. As Trump and his team have veered from trigger to trigger, it has been a cascading escalation of testing limits that have left Democrats careening from topic to topic in prosecuting a political argument against the President. The FBI has agreed to set in to hunt down absentee Democratic lawmakers in Texas who have left the state to block a political move to redraw its congressional map. Trump has announced he would build a massive ballroom—twice the size of the Executive Mansion—on the White House grounds. He has dramatically scrapped whole slices of the federal workforce, ignored Congress' spending plans, and swapped out top officials on the regular. Nothing, it seems, is beyond his wreckage. All of which is leading to a point that seems to be as familiar as fated to fail. In his first term, Trump deployed 5,000 federal troops to Washington to quell peaceful protests championing racial justice after the murder of George Floyd that sparked the Black Lives Matter movement. In his mind, Trump saw the show of force—low-flying helicopters blasting air down at protesters, Guardsmen clearing parks ahead of a photo-op, tear-gassing of activists—as core to his law-and-order image. That was a distraction from the perpetual confusion in that first year of Covid, which in itself was a distraction from much of Trump's rampage through Washington. But months later, Trump lost his re-election bid to Joe Biden. This go 'round, Trump is obviously going for a redo, and this time without any real pretense. Trump has long held a scorn for Washington, which as a stand-alone city operates similar to a state but without the autonomy, and its permanent population. Because of its unique standing, Trump and Congress both have power over the city and can meddle mightily in its local affairs but historically have been more nuisance than viceroy. Last year, no other jurisdiction broke more decisively for Kamala Harris over Trump, going 9-to-1 against Trump. Now, Trump is ready to show Washingtonians and other blue-city voters who is in control. It's a move that seems destined to draw the ire of locals, yet whether it will reach anywhere near the levels found in the weeks after George Floyd's murder remains to be seen. Regardless, this is where Trump likes to default: outrage and chaos, bluster and bravado. It usually serves Trump well—until it doesn't. Make sense of what matters in Washington. Sign up for the D.C. Brief newsletter.
USA Today
43 minutes ago
- USA Today
President, mayor, police chief, social worker. Trump is a man of many hats
Alongside his Washington, D.C. takeover of local law enforcement, President Trump also vows to clear away the homeless and pave the potholes. Donald Trump's expansive view of his powers is no longer limited to those traditionally exercised by a president. With his decision to take control of D.C. police and deploy national guardsmen and FBI agents on the city's streets − citing a spree of lawlessness that isn't supported by federal crime data − the president took charge of tasks typically in the domain of the mayor and the police chief. There was more. He also vowed to clear out the homeless from encampments (though short on details about where they would go, exactly) as well as pave the streets and fill the potholes. He is a hands-on leader, he boasted, even when it comes to White House decor and his plans to build a huge ballroom and install new marble floors. "I'm announcing a historic action to rescue our nation's capital from crime, bloodshed, bedlam and squalor and worse," he said at the beginning of a freewheeling news conference that stretched for more than an hour. "This is Liberation Day in D.C., and we're going to take our capital back." Why now? That wasn't entirely clear, especially at a time crime in Washington is on a significant slide. In January, The U.S. attorney's office announced that violent crime in Washington in 2024 was at a 30-year low, down 35% from 2023. So far this year, DC's Metropolitan Police Department said that as of Aug. 10, violent crime has dropped another 26%. Except for a spike during the COVID-19 pandemic in 2022 and 2023, violent crime in the District of Columbia has been steadily declining since 2012. Trump was clearly unconvinced, depicting a dystopian landscape outside the White House gates. "Our capital city has been overtaken by violent gangs and bloodthirsty criminals, roving mobs of wild youth, drugged out maniacs and homeless people," he said. He mentioned in particular the beating of a former staffer from the Department on Governmental Efficiency during an attempted carjacking. He suggested the reporters in the room, many of whom live in Washington, should be grateful that he was moving to protect them. Can Trump do that? Yes. Should he? Trump declared a public safety emergency in Washington − seizing control of the police department and sending 800 national guardsmen on the streets and another 120 FBI agents on night patrols. While critics argued that it wasn't necessary or wise to take these steps, they generally didn't argue that he lacked the power to do them. "He's doing this because he can," city councilman Charles Allen said. To be clear, standing on the side of law-and-order doesn't usually require a profile in courage. It has been a Republican trope since Richard Nixon and before. In recent years, it has been stoked by demands by Democrats and others for social-justice reforms in the wake of notorious cases of police brutality. Trump depicted crime as a failure of Democratic leaders and a consequence of their policies. He warned other Democratic enclaves − New York, Chicago, Los Angeles − that he just might consider taking similar steps to impose order on their streets. What particularly irked his fiercest critics was the contrast with Trump's action, or his lack of it, during what was undeniably a law-enforcement crisis in Washington on Jan. 6, 2021. Thousands of his supporters stormed the U.S. Capitol, disrupting the ceremonial count of Electoral College ballots in an election he had lost and sending senators and representatives scrambling for safety. Then, Trump didn't deploy the National Guard. Afterwards, more than 1,575 people were charged with crimes. At least 600 were charged with the felony of assaulting or impeding law enforcement. Trump himself was also indicted on criminal charges for trying to overturn the results of the 2020 election that he lost – a prosecution he managed to avoid facing trial on by winning the presidency again. On the first day of his second term, Trump granted a blanket clemency to the Jan. 6 defendants. Durban: 'Political theater' to draw attention from Jeffrey Epstein This time, Illinois Sen. Dick Durbin called Trump's actions "political theater" and "a typical move by this president to create chaos and uncertainty, and to draw the attention from other issues like Jeffrey Epstein." Trump was "trying to change the subject," said Durbin, one of the top Democrats who oversees the Justice Department. Trump did answer questions from reporters about the traditional business of the presidency. He discussed his vision of a "land swap" he might negotiate with Russian President Vladimir Putin during their scheduled meeting on Aug. 15 in Alaska to end the war in Ukraine. He said he would soon decide whether to reclassify marijuana as a less dangerous drug, and he teased the ongoing trade negotiations with China. Then, yes, there was Epstein, whose case had broken back into the headlines just before Trump walked out into the White House briefing room. A federal judge denied the Trump administration's request to release testimony in the grand jury that indicted Ghislaine Maxwell, Epstein's former partner who is serving her own 20-year prison sentence on sex trafficking charges. The request was part of the tamp down swirling controversy among Trump's MAGA base about whether powerful people were being protected from disclosure. As he left the briefing room, the president ignored shouted questions about the case − though like the new crackdown on crime, that topic isn't likely to go away anytime soon.
USA Today
an hour ago
- USA Today
President, mayor, police chief social worker. Trump is a man of many hats
Alongside his Washington, D.C. takeover of local law enforcement, President Trump also vows to clear away the homeless and pave the potholes. Donald Trump's expansive view of his powers is no longer limited to those traditionally exercised by a president. With his decision to take control of D.C. police and deploy national guardsmen and FBI agents on the city's streets − citing a spree of lawlessness that isn't supported by federal crime data − the president took charge of tasks typically in the domain of the mayor and the police chief. There was more. He also vowed to clear out the homeless from encampments (though short on details about where they would go, exactly) as well as pave the streets and fill the potholes. He is a hands-on leader, he boasted, even when it comes to White House decor and his plans to build a huge ballroom and install new marble floors. "I'm announcing a historic action to rescue our nation's capital from crime, bloodshed, bedlam and squalor and worse," he said at the beginning of a freewheeling news conference that stretched for more than an hour. "This is Liberation Day in D.C., and we're going to take our capital back." Why now? That wasn't entirely clear, especially at a time crime in Washington is on a significant slide. In January, The U.S. attorney's office announced that violent crime in Washington in 2024 was at a 30-year low, down 35% from 2023. So far this year, DC's Metropolitan Police Department said that as of Aug. 10, violent crime has dropped another 26%. Except for a spike during the COVID-19 pandemic in 2022 and 2023, violent crime in the District of Columbia has been steadily declining since 2012. Trump was clearly unconvinced, depicting a dystopian landscape outside the White House gates. "Our capital city has been overtaken by violent gangs and bloodthirsty criminals, roving mobs of wild youth, drugged out maniacs and homeless people," he said. He mentioned in particular the beating of a former staffer from the Department on Governmental Efficiency during an attempted carjacking. He suggested the reporters in the room, many of whom live in Washington, should be grateful that he was moving to protect them. Can Trump do that? Yes. Should he? Trump declared a public safety emergency in Washington − seizing control of the police department and sending 800 national guardsmen on the streets and another 120 FBI agents on night patrols. While critics argued that it wasn't necessary or wise to take these steps, they generally didn't argue that he lacked the power to do them. "He's doing this because he can," city councilman Charles Allen said. To be clear, standing on the side of law-and-order doesn't usually require a profile in courage. It has been a Republican trope since Richard Nixon and before. In recent years, it has been stoked by demands by Democrats and others for social-justice reforms in the wake of notorious cases of police brutality. Trump depicted crime as a failure of Democratic leaders and a consequence of their policies. He warned other Democratic enclaves − New York, Chicago, Los Angeles − that he just might consider taking similar steps to impose order on their streets. What particularly irked his fiercest critics was the contrast with Trump's action, or his lack of it, during what was undeniably a law-enforcement crisis in Washington on Jan. 6, 2021. Thousands of his supporters stormed the U.S. Capitol, disrupting the ceremonial count of Electoral College ballots in an election he had lost and sending senators and representatives scrambling for safety. Then, Trump didn't deploy the National Guard. Afterwards, more than 1,575 people were charged with crimes. At least 600 were charged with the felony of assaulting or impeding law enforcement. Trump himself was also indicted on criminal charges for trying to overturn the results of the 2020 election that he lost – a prosecution he managed to avoid facing trial on by winning the presidency again. On the first day of his second term, Trump granted a blanket clemency to the Jan. 6 defendants. Durban: 'Political theater' to draw attention from Jeffrey Epstein This time, Illinois Sen. Dick Durbin called Trump's actions "political theater" and "a typical move by this president to create chaos and uncertainty, and to draw the attention from other issues like Jeffrey Epstein." Trump was "trying to change the subject," said Durbin, one of the top Democrats who oversees the Justice Department. Trump did answer questions from reporters about the traditional business of the presidency. He discussed his vision of a "land swap" he might negotiate with Russian President Vladimir Putin during their scheduled meeting on Aug. 15 in Alaska to end the war in Ukraine. He said he would soon decide whether to reclassify marijuana as a less dangerous drug, and he teased the ongoing trade negotiations with China. Then, yes, there was Epstein, whose case had broken back into the headlines just before Trump walked out into the White House briefing room. A federal judge denied the Trump administration's request to release testimony in the grand jury that indicted Ghislaine Maxwell, Epstein's former partner who is serving her own 20-year prison sentence on sex trafficking charges. The request was part of the tamp down swirling controversy among Trump's MAGA base about whether powerful people were being protected from disclosure. As he left the briefing room, the president ignored shouted questions about the case − though like the new crackdown on crime, that topic isn't likely to go away anytime soon.
