There are many plausible explanations for the recent crime downturn: sharper policing strategy, more police overtime, low unemployment, the lure of digital life, and the post-pandemic return to normalcy. Each of these surely played a role.
But only one theory can match the decline in its scope and scale:
that the massive, post-pandemic investment in local governments deployed during the Biden administration, particularly through the American Rescue Plan Act, delivered a huge boost to the infrastructure and services of American communities—including those that suffered most from violent crime.
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Naturally, every local leader likes to say that their police department is making the difference.
But in this case, every happy family is not alike: Police staffing and strategy vary widely from place to place, so an exceptional local police chief can hardly explain gains that are so widespread.
“What has changed nationally is a huge investment by the federal government in prevention in response to the COVID epidemic,” John Roman, a criminal-justice researcher who heads NORC’s Center on Public Safety and Justice at the University of Chicago, told me. He credits ARPA with sending billions to local governments to use as they saw fit, and defines prevention in the broadest possible sense.
“Investing in education, police, librarians, community centers, social workers, and local nonprofits. Local-government employment rolls increased almost perfectly inverse to the crime rate.”
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Other factors may have contributed, but cannot explain the magnitude of the shift on their own. The Trump administration claimed last summer that crime had fallen thanks to its pursuit of “violent criminal illegal aliens,” though that does nothing to explain the record-setting numbers from 2024.
Society may be healing from the pandemic—reflected in falling rates of overdoses, suicides, and traffic “accidents”—but that doesn’t answer why Americans are less likely to get killed now than before we all learned what an N95 was.
Digital entertainment may be keeping kids off the streets, but social media has also accelerated deadly disputes. Technology may be solving crimes, but even established policing tech sometimes turns out not to matter in crime prevention.
The public likely has an easier time understanding the direct and highly visible role that police play in deterrence and arrests, in contrast to the hidden work of anti-violence nonprofits, to say nothing of the more diffuse benefits of a blight-reduction fund or a new HVAC system at the library.
“Mayors are always going to credit the quality of their police for doing good work and lowering crime,” Matt Tuerk, the mayor of Allentown, Pennsylvania, told me—after, of course, crediting the quality of his police for doing good work and lowering crime.
Tuerk says that Allentown has seen homicides fall from 17 in 2023 to four in 2024 and five in 2025, the lowest numbers since the 1980s.
“But there are so many factors that influence those crime statistics—parademic-response time, jobs programs, conflict-resolution techniques at violence-interrupter organizations, investments in neighborhood conditions. A thousand fathers for that victory of crime reduction.”
These hypotheses are about to be put to a test.
Police staffing is recovering in many cities, and police funding remains as much a political priority as ever, but the last of the ARPA grants will be spent this year, forcing cities to make choices about which programs to fund and which to eliminate.
Many “alternative” public-safety grants have already been cut by the Trump administration, leaving recipients such as schools and community organizations in the lurch.
It’s as if the national gravity pulling down crime rates will suddenly evaporate, Roman, at the University of Chicago, suggested, revealing the weight of local choices. Baltimore is working on a post-ARPA plan to make sure its public-health approach to policing can be supported by the city’s general fund, but not every investment of the Biden years can be sustained.
For now, the new, less violent moment means relief and opportunity for the country’s most dangerous neighborhoods.
“When violence falls, city life opens up, and the most disadvantaged communities benefit the most,” Sharkey said.
“There is new investment, families take part in public life, and kids are allowed to be out in parks. It just changes the nature of city life in a fundamental way.”
But the calm is precarious. To keep it, we will have to figure out what made it possible in the first place.
Things I Find Interesting [aka, the stuff rattling around inside the brain of Torr Leonard] 