Last summer, a protester in Seattle made an anti-police sign with an unusual message. Hey SPD, it read. Crime is down 20 percent, and you had nothing to do with it.

The taunt was glib, but it hinted at a profound question about the nature of public safety in American cities. After a pandemic-era rise in murders commonly attributed to a lack of policing, Seattle recorded fewer homicides in 2025 than in 2019, despite a much-smaller police force. If less policing made crime go up following the George Floyd protests—and most people thought it did—then what has made it go down?

What happened in Seattle is happening even more dramatically across the country, as America experiences a once-in-a-lifetime improvement in public safety despite a police-staffing crisis. In August, the FBI released its final data for 2024, which showed that America’s violent-crime rate fell to its lowest level since 1969, led by a nearly 15 percent decrease in homicide—the steepest annual drop ever recorded.

Preliminary 2025 numbers look even better. The crime analyst Jeff Asher has concluded that the national murder rate through October 2025 fell by almost 20 percent—and all other major crimes declined as well. The post-pandemic crime wave has receded, and then some. According to Asher’s analysis, Detroit, San Francisco, Chicago, Newark, and a handful of other big cities recorded their lowest murder rates since the 1950s and ’60s. “Our cities are as safe as they’ve ever been in the history of the country,” Patrick Sharkey, a sociologist at Princeton who studies urban violence, told me.