Was crime in the 60s and 70s lower than it is in 2025 per capita
Executive summary
Measured per capita, most official indicators show that violent and property crime rose from the 1960s into the 1970s and peaked later, then fell sharply from the 1990s into the 2010s; by 2024–2025 many headline measures of crime are back near or below rates seen in the early 1960s, though the pattern varies by offense and measurement method [1] [2] [3] [4]. Data comparability, changes in reporting, and differences between victimization surveys and police counts complicate a simple “then vs now” answer, so any claim must be qualified by those methodological limits [5] [6] [7].
1. The long arc: rise from the 1960s into the 1970s, peak later
For decades of scholarship and official compilations the story is consistent: violent crime rose sharply after World War II, with violent offending nearly quadrupling from 1960 to its peak around 1991 and property crime more than doubling over that span, meaning the 1970s were part of a sustained upward trend from the 1960s rather than a low baseline [1] [2].
2. The recent reversal: big declines since the 1990s and especially into the 2010s and 2020s
Since roughly the mid-1990s the United States experienced a long, steady fall in many crime rates; multiple sources note steep declines in violent crime and in specific measures like homicide compared with the late 20th century, and by the early 2020s some datasets show crime at or below levels last seen in the 1960s [1] [2] [3] [4].
3. Murder and homicide as a focal point: 1960s vs 1970s vs 2020s
Homicide rates were roughly 5 per 100,000 in the 1960s, climbed to around 9 per 100,000 in the 1970s where they “hovered” for two decades, and then fell again such that by the late 2010s they had returned to near-1960s levels (for example, around 5.0 per 100,000 in 2018), with some reports indicating historic lows through 2024–2025 for aggregated tracked crimes including homicide [2] [1] [4] [3].
4. Measurement matters: victimization surveys vs police reports and estimation issues
Different instruments tell slightly different stories: the National Crime Victimization Survey shows large declines in victimizations since the early 1990s (from ~79.8 to 23.2 victimizations per 1,000 people for violent crime in one comparison), while FBI UCR/estimated totals have undergone methodological changes and estimation procedures to account for missing agency data stretching back to the 1960s, complicating direct year‑to‑year or decade‑to‑decade comparisons [8] [5] [6].
5. What the aggregate verdict looks like for 2025 per capita
When the question is framed strictly as “was crime in the 1960s and 1970s lower than in 2025 per capita,” the best reading of the available reporting is: compared with the 1970s crime rates were generally higher then than in 2025 for many measures, while relative to the 1960s the answer is mixed — some measures (notably homicide) were similar in the 1960s and 2020s, others (property crime and many violent indices) were higher in the 1970s and later and are now substantially lower than those peaks [1] [2] [3] [4]. The caveat is that “crime” is not a single number: trends differ by offense type, region, and how incidents are counted.
6. Perception vs data, and limits of current reporting
Public fear and political narratives have not always matched the data — perceptions of rising crime often persist even when victimization and many police-reported metrics are falling — and contemporary summaries claiming “lowest since the 1960s” draw on specific aggregated measures and recent FBI/analyst estimates, so readers should treat broad headlines as shorthand for a more nuanced statistical picture and remain attentive to differences in datasets and measurement changes over decades [8] [4] [5].