The New York Times is dumbfounded as to what could be causing the fall in murder rates across the United States.
The Times was the first to report on the news that the U.S. murder rate had hit a 125-year low after President Donald Trump’s first year back in office.
According to data from the nonpartisan think tank, The Council on Criminal Justice, it is estimated that the homicide rate dropped 21 percent from 2024 to 2025.
“When nationwide data for jurisdictions of all sizes is reported by the FBI later this year, there is a strong possibility that homicides in 2025 will drop to about 4.0 per 100,000 residents,” the organization said.
”That would be the lowest rate ever recorded in law enforcement or public health data going back to 1900, and would mark the largest single-year percentage drop in the homicide rate on record,” they continued.
NYT: Murder Rate Hits 125-Year Low in Trump’s First Year Back in Office — Biggest Single-Year Drop Ever
However, the paper has now claimed that “no one knows for sure” what is causing the massive decline.
While the Times asserted that Trump would try to take credit for the figures because of his tough approach to law and order, it has suggested that the two things are not correlated.
Their report stated:
Experts said there is little to justify any claim that President Trump is responsible for last year’s drop in crime.
“There are many more cities that didn’t have the National Guard that saw their crime go down than cities who had the National Guard who saw their crime go down,” said Alex Piquero, who served as head of the Bureau of Justice Statistics during the Biden administration and now teaches criminology at the University of Miami.
In fact, researchers have long struggled to explain why crime fluctuates. Research has credited policing strategies and incarceration rates, mental health treatment and gun laws, the beautification of vacant lots and the phasing out of lead, which impairs brain development, from gasoline in the 1970s. Improvements in life-saving medical care have also reduced the homicide rate (though the new study finds that assaults also declined, by 6 percent since 2019).
Charles Fain Lehman, a senior fellow at the Policing and Public Safety Initiative of the Manhattan Institute, a conservative think tank, pointed to changes like the aging of America, increased obesity, and the ubiquity of surveillance through security and cellphone cameras. “Basically the structural factors in society are pushing us towards less crime,” he said.
Today’s reminder that the @nytimes is a total joke… pic.twitter.com/pHKK9XkOD8
— Eric Trump (@EricTrump) January 23, 2026
President Trump’s law and order platform focuses on empowering local police through increased federal funding and militarization, ending cashless bail, and aggressively deploying federal resources to dismantle drug cartels and suppress urban crime.
His most notable action has involved sending the National Guard into Washington, D.C., which even Democrats have been forced to admit has driven down violent crime in the nation’s capital.
The post New York Times Insists ‘No One Knows’ What is Behind ‘Staggering Fall’ in U.S. Murder Rate appeared first on The Gateway Pundit.