Homicides fell 18 percent in major American cities during the first half of 2026, and the White House says President Trump's law enforcement agenda deserves the credit.
The nonpartisan Council on Criminal Justice released its midyear crime report on July 23, and the numbers are stark. Across 30 major U.S. cities, homicides dropped 18 percent in the first half of 2026 compared with the same period a year earlier, roughly 215 fewer people killed. If that trend holds through December, the council says 2026 will close out with the lowest annual homicide rate the country has recorded in more than 100 years.
Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt seized on the figures within hours of the report's release, telling reporters the murder rate has plummeted to its lowest point since 1900. "Thanks to President Trump's law-and-order agenda, crime across the country has plummeted to the lowest level in more than 100 years," the White House said in a statement, pointing to surged federal law enforcement and National Guard deployments into Washington, D.C., along with offers of the same support to other Democrat-run cities battling violence. Trump has repeated a version of that claim publicly more than ten times since late January, according to fact-checking reviews of his remarks, though those reviews note he sometimes conflates the narrower murder rate with the broader crime rate, which also folds in property offenses. The White House, pressed for clarification, pointed specifically to the murder numbers, the same figures the Council on Criminal Justice is now confirming independently.
The scale of the drop is not a one-year blip. The council's data shows homicide rates in the first half of 2026 running 51 percent below where they stood in the first half of 2022, when many cities were still absorbing the pandemic-era crime surge. Carjackings posted the steepest decline of any offense tracked, down 47 percent nationally. Nine of the thirteen crime categories the council monitors came in lower this year than last.
The report is not uniform good news, and the council does not pretend otherwise. Roughly a third of the 30 cities sampled bucked the national trend entirely. San Francisco recorded a 55 percent increase in homicides in the first half of 2026 compared with a year earlier. Norfolk, Virginia, saw killings jump 64 percent over the same stretch. Both cities have kept in place the kind of progressive prosecutorial policies, reduced pretrial detention, lighter charging on repeat offenders, that Republicans have argued for years invite more violence, not less. San Francisco's homicide numbers had already drawn scrutiny earlier this year when local police statistics showed a sharp spring spike. The contrast between cities that leaned into aggressive enforcement and those that did not is exactly the argument conservatives have made since the 2020 defund-the-police push began: policy choices at the local level show up in body counts, and the two Council on Criminal Justice outliers make that case with real numbers rather than talking points.
The gains have limits worth naming
The council's report also flags categories moving the wrong way. Shoplifting, domestic violence and sexual assault all posted modest increases in the first half of 2026 compared with last year, and drug offenses rose 12 percent, the largest increase of any category tracked, though still below pre-pandemic levels. None of that erases an 18 percent drop in killings, but it is a reminder that the crime picture is not one straight line downward, and a report built on honest numbers has to include the categories that did not improve alongside the ones that did.
Researchers at the council were careful not to hand the credit entirely to any single policy, crediting a mix of law enforcement strategy shifts, technology and broader social change for the decline. The White House was under no such obligation to hedge, and it did not. Whether 2026 actually closes as the safest year in over a century will depend on the second half of the year holding the same trajectory as the first. The council plans a full-year report in early 2027, and that document, not a midyear projection, will settle the question for good. Until then, the direction is clear even if the final number is not: killings are down, sharply, in most of the country, and the cities that are the exception are the ones still running the policies Republicans have spent years warning against.
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