Kash Patel wrongly takes credit for falling crime rates

The FBI released a preliminary “First Look” at 2025 crime data this month, which showed significant drops over the year before. Compared to 2024, in 2025, homicides fell close to 20%, total violent crime fell almost 10% and property crime fell over 10%. These results are unequivocally good news, and they make clear that the steady decline in violent crime that began in late 2021 and early 2022 has continued — even into 2026. By and large, the increase in violence that came in the wake of Covid-19 has been more than eliminated, and many cities have seen some of the lowest rates of violence, particularly homicide, in generations.

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And the news is actually better than that. The Major Cities Chiefs Association (whose data on big cities tends to track the national trends pretty closely) just released year-to-date data comparing Q1 of 2025 to Q1 of 2026, which showed more big drops. Homicides were down almost 20%, and robberies were down over 20%. Jeff Asher, who runs the Real Time Crime Index, predicted that in 2026, we could see the lowest recorded homicide rates ever, certainly the lowest in recent memory.

The FBI under President Donald Trump, however, could not let the crime data stand on its own. The bureau found it necessary to include the overwrought self-aggrandizing commentary that characterizes announcements from this administration. The FBI’s news release quotes beleaguered FBI Director Kash Patel, who said, “Over the last 14 months we made major transformations at the FBI, and these results show those changes are working. This FBI will continue to stack these wins for the American people under President Trump and always Back the Blue every step of the way.” Patel’s emphasis on the FBI in particular, and on “backing the blue” more generally, misstates the likely causes of this decline.

To start, the FBI, no matter its director or the presidential administration, has never been a major driver of crime trends.  Structurally, it cannot be. The United States has about  750,000 state- and local-sworn police officers and sheriffs’ deputies. The FBI? It has about 13,500 field agents, i.e., less than 2% of all law enforcement. And the FBI has limited jurisdiction. The feds don’t move the needle much when it comes to local spending, either. Federal grants to local and state law enforcement are about $3 billion to $4 billion, against state and local spending on police that comes to about $135 billion. So, again, about 2% to 3% of the total. (And most of those grants come from the Justice and Homeland Security departments, not the FBI.)

The FBI has never been large enough to exert a significant effect on crime rates, and under Trump and Patel, it has become smaller still and less focused on crime. Indeed, some of the major “transformations” at the FBI during Trump’s second term have included reducing the workforce by approximately 6%  and diverting many of the remaining officers away from investigating things like gun crime to support White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller’s violent campaign against generally nonviolent immigrants. Not only has that campaign not made us safer, it may be undermining efforts to reduce crime.

Making matters worse, Trump has pushed what little money the feds provide local governments away from successful programs. He has already cut close to $1 billion in grants that fund local programs such as police investigations into sexual violence, child abuse on tribal lands and others for violence interruption programs in cities. This is entirely unsurprising. Those who embrace “tough on crime” rhetoric the way Trump does never seem interested in public safety; rather, they favor using the police to impose social control over disliked groups. The termination of those grants certainly undercuts any claims that the feds deserve credit for a decline in crime. That decline has come despite such policies.

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On top of overselling the importance of the feds to the current declines in crime, Patel’s claim that the FBI will “always Back the Blue, every step of the way” oversells the impact of policing of any sort on the decline in crime. Trying to explain any sort of major shift in trends is a risky endeavor, especially in its early days when data is still coming in. But one of the most compelling theories I have seen about the spike in lethal violence during Covid and the sudden rapid decline that followed came from John K. Roman, who linked it to government employment, just not police employment.

Patel’s claim that the FBI will “always Back the Blue, every step of the way” oversells the impact of policing on the decline in crime.

Roman’s theory, which has numbers to support it, is that local trends in homicide track trends in local, nonpolice government employment: teachers, drug and mental health counselors and all other government employees who, on a daily basis, interact with people at risk of committing violence. As Covid eviscerated local budgets, those people were far more likely than police to find their jobs cut or suspended, and homicides rose with the cuts. As post-Covid budgets recovered (with some federal support, but often more or less on their own) those jobs came back, and homicides fell along with their return.

That is not to say police are irrelevant. But there was little change in police employment over this time. There were, however, substantial changes in nonpolice employment — and changes that track the changes in violence. And strengthening Roman’s argument is extensive evidence that all sorts of nonpolice interventions, including those that would have been reduced or eliminated by Covid-era budget cuts, can have significantly lower crime.

Crime continuing to fall since the 2020-2021 Covid spike in violence is a remarkable reversal that has gotten a fraction of the attention it deserves and a fraction of the attention the media has paid to the spike itself. But Patel’s FBI has exaggerated its role in that decline and wrongly credited the tough-on-crime-, “back the Blue”-style policing that Trump supports. It’s not surprising that Trump’s administration would take credit for a decline it didn’t cause and likely undermined, but it’s important that the rest of us push back against that narrative and reject the ineffective policies the administration wants us to applaud.

John Pfaff

John Pfaff is a professor of law at the Fordham University School of Law. He is the author of “Locked In: The True Causes of Mass Incarceration and How to Achieve Real Reform.”