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Which US city has seen the largest decrease in crime rate from 2020 to 2025?
Executive Summary
The available analyses do not identify a single U.S. city that experienced the largest overall crime‑rate decline from 2020 to 2025; instead, they report broad declines in violent crime across multiple cities and highlight notable reductions in homicides and violent offenses without a city‑by‑city 2020–2025 ranking. The pieces emphasize that high‑homicide cities such as Baltimore and St. Louis contributed significantly to aggregate declines, and that some cities saw year‑to‑year variability, but none of the summaries provides the specific five‑year comparative data necessary to answer which city experienced the greatest drop [1] [2] [3].
1. Why the question can’t be answered yet — gaps the reporting exposes
All three analytic threads converge on a single limitation: no source presents a direct, city‑by‑city comparison of crime rates between 2020 and 2025, which is the exact measure needed to name the city with the largest decline. The Stateline analysis highlights broad patterns and mid‑year comparisons—like a reported 17% drop in homicides in the first half of 2025 versus the first half of 2024—but stops short of providing the five‑year percentage change for each city needed to establish a definitive ranking [1]. The Council on Criminal Justice updates give detailed trend slices (for example, 2019–2025 or 2024–2025 percent changes for some cities) but explicitly do not assemble those figures into a 2020–2025 ordered comparison; their focus is trend analysis and mid‑year snapshots rather than creating a single five‑year leaderboard [2]. The aggregate summaries therefore leave a critical data gap: we lack a standardized, comparable crime‑rate baseline for 2020 and a matching measurement for 2025 across the same city list.
2. What the available reports do agree on — the big picture of recent declines
Despite the absence of a definitive city ranking, the sources consistently report a notable decline in violent crime and homicides across many major U.S. cities in 2024–2025, with particular falls concentrated in cities that previously had very high homicide rates. Stateline and the Council on Criminal Justice both document that national and multi‑city aggregates show movement downward from pandemic peaks, and they single out cities such as Baltimore and St. Louis as major contributors to the aggregate drop because of large absolute reductions in homicide counts [1] [2]. The summaries also note heterogeneity: several cities experienced increases in certain crime categories even as the overall trend leaned downward, underscoring that local dynamics remain important and that aggregate improvements do not translate evenly into uniform city‑level declines [1] [3].
3. Conflicting snapshots and the problem of differing time windows
The analyses reveal conflicts driven by inconsistent time windows and metric choices: some reports compare mid‑year 2025 to mid‑year 2024, others present 2019–2025 figures or partial‑year drops for specific crimes, and none uniformly compares 2020 to 2025 across the same cities. This inconsistency produces different narratives about which places look most improved depending on whether one examines homicide counts, violent‑crime rates, or broader crime indices and whether one uses calendar‑year, rolling 12‑month, or mid‑year slices [2] [1]. The consequence is that a city could register a large 2024–2025 percentage decline but still not rank first over the full 2020–2025 span; conversely, a city with steady declines across multiple years might be obscured in a mid‑year snapshot. Therefore, apparent contradictions between reports reflect methodological choices rather than factual errors [2] [3].
4. Where reporting emphasizes particular cities — and why that matters
Several analyses call attention to cities with historically high crime rates because reductions there have outsized effects on the national picture, a selection effect that shapes readers’ impressions. Stateline names Baltimore and St. Louis as large contributors to overall declines, and other pieces reference significant year‑over‑year drops in places like Denver and Chattanooga for specific years [1] [2]. This emphasis is driven partly by the arithmetic of high baselines—large absolute declines in a high‑homicide city register as large contributions to aggregate improvement—even if those cities do not necessarily show the largest percentage declines from 2020 to 2025. The reporting thus blends the story of absolute impact with that of relative change, and readers seeking a single “largest percentage decline” must distinguish between absolute reductions and proportional decreases [1] [2].
5. What would be required to answer the original question definitively
To name the city with the largest crime‑rate decrease from 2020 to 2025, analysts must supply a standardized set of crime rates for each city in 2020 and 2025, calculated using the same crime definitions and population denominators, and then compute percentage changes across those five years. None of the provided summaries contains that completed computation; the Council on Criminal Justice offers valuable inputs for parts of that task but not the uniform five‑year comparison sought [2]. The path forward is clear: compile consistent city‑level rates for 2020 and for the full 2025 year (or comparable full‑year measures), then rank the percentage declines. Until such a dataset is produced and published, any claim naming a single U.S. city as having the largest 2020–2025 crime‑rate drop would be unsupported by the available reporting [1] [3].