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By Adam Gelb
President and CEO of the Council on Criminal Justice
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The nation’s homicide rate has dropped to its lowest level since 1900, and the historic plunge over the past four years has touched off a vigorous, high-stakes debate over who and what deserves credit. On the campaign trail, President Donald Trump has pointed to immigration enforcement and National Guard deployments. Others have emphasized pandemic-era social spending and the expansion of community violence intervention programs.
Those are the most visible claims, but they are only a few among dozens of possible explanations. What about the rapid spread of police surveillance cameras and license plate readers? Improvements in emergency response and trauma care? The crackdown on illegal firearms dealers and ghost guns? Declines in alcohol consumption? The explosion in use of GLP-1 medications that may suppress impulses? The shrinking amount of time young people spend socializing in person?
To sort through the dizzying list of possibilities, the Council on Criminal Justice brought together four dozen researchers from criminology, economics, public health and other disciplines to assess the most commonly cited drivers of the homicide decline from 2022 through 2026. Over two days, the scholars reviewed evidence, debated competing claims and then anonymously rated 48 factors based on how much each may have contributed.
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The results are not a triumph for the left, the right or some mushy middle. They are a rebuke to the habit of forcing explanations for difficult national problems through an ideological filter—and a reminder that complex questions become easier to answer when evidence does the sorting.
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There was broad support for community violence intervention—efforts to engage people at highest risk of shootings—which expanded significantly in many cities with high homicide rates and large recent declines. But focused deterrence, a “carrot and stick” approach combining targeted law enforcement and threats of prosecution with offers of services and support, ranked near the top as well. Researchers also saw a contribution from proactive policing: the revival of officer-initiated patrols, stops and other preventive enforcement that had declined in some cities after George Floyd’s murder in 2020. Other leading explanations included easing of pandemic-era disruption, increased local government capacity and a greater concentration of public safety and support resources among a shrinking population engaged in risky behaviors.
Other findings scrambled the familiar political fault lines even further. Increased incarceration and pretrial detention, along with the administration’s immigration crackdown and National Guard deployments, received almost no support. But the same applied to improved housing stability and stronger employment and labor-market conditions, explanations more commonly associated with the left. Stricter federal gun policy and enforcement split the group almost down the middle: 43 percent saw at least a limited contribution, while 55 percent saw a negligible impact or none at all.
One reason the results cut across ideological lines is that every explanation had to survive the same tests. Was there a credible way it could reduce homicides? Did the change occur at the right time and on a large enough scale to move the national rate? Did it reach the people and places most involved in lethal violence?
Surveillance technology demonstrates why an intuitively appealing explanation still needs to be examined against the evidence. Police cameras and automated license plate readers proliferated during the past four years, and they’ve captured an abundance of headlines lately. But initial studies suggest their deterrent power may be greater for property crimes like stealing cars than for homicides, which tend to stem from impulsive or emotional situations in which people aren’t thinking about being caught on camera. Most researchers rated surveillance as a limited or non-contributor.
Trauma care ran into a different problem: timing. Faster emergency response and medical advances unquestionably save shooting victims who once would have died. But a large study found that firearm injury mortality had been falling over a period stretching from 2004 to 2023, making it difficult to attribute the abrupt homicide drop beginning in 2022 to improvements that had been unfolding over many years. Researchers split almost evenly on that factor.
Subjecting each explanation to the same practical tests helped cut through the tired and paralyzing debates over policing versus prevention and incarceration versus rehabilitation. Instead, the researchers coalesced around a more strategic approach that concentrates attention and resources on the people and places at greatest risk of violence.
Focused deterrence makes the point powerfully. It identifies people and groups at highest risk of serious violence, offers services and support, communicates clear consequences for continued violence and uses targeted enforcement when necessary. Is that policing or prevention? Yes it is.
This doesn’t mean that “both sides are right.” It does mean that our political labels are poorly suited to judging specific strategies. A program that sends a credible messenger to interrupt a brewing retaliation and a police unit that targets the tiny number of people driving a city’s gun violence may be attacking the same problem from different angles—and they may work better together than either does alone.
At the same time, it’s clear that targeting is only part of the story. There are big social and cultural forces shaping behavior linked to violence that are far beyond the reach of criminal justice policy. After all, the decline has happened in cities with very different public safety strategies, economic conditions and political leadership.
None of this produces a single, easy explanation for homicide dropping to a historic low. Easing pandemic disruption was the only factor a majority of researchers rated as a major contributor, and participants emphasized that several forces almost certainly overlapped and reinforced one another.
Nor does explaining the past necessarily produce a policy road map for the future. A factor that appears to have had little impact on violence over the past four years could still help over the next four. And while social isolation may have played a role, more young people hanging out alone at home on their screens is hardly a public safety strategy anyone would want to promote.
But the absence of a smoking gun does not mean every theory deserves equal billing. To understand why fewer Americans are being killed, we have to be willing to look beyond our ideological lenses to see which explanations actually fit the facts.
Adam Gelb is the president and CEO of the Council on Criminal Justice.
The views expressed in this article are the writer's own.
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