By Humeyra Pamuk and Dan Rosenzweig-Ziff
Garden City, New York, Aug 14 (Reuters) - U.S. President Donald Trump touted falling violent crime rates on Friday as evidence that his law-and-order and aggressive immigration agenda is working, seeking to shift attention away from economic concerns that have hurt his approval ratings ahead of November's midterm elections.
Trump visited the Nassau County Police Academy in New York to unveil 2025 data from the Federal Bureau of Investigation that showed the largest
year-to-year decline in violent crime on record.
Republicans are looking for issues that will resonate with swing voters angry about inflation and the economic fallout from the war with Iran, while casting Democrats as out of step on public safety.
In a wide-ranging speech that extended beyond crime to immigration, Iran, New York state politics and other issues, Trump argued without evidence that his mass deportation campaign was a major contributor to that decline, though experts say there is no one reason to explain the fall.
"We're getting them the hell out," Trump said.
However, the data shows that the fall in crime predates Trump's return to office, with homicide rates plummeting in 2023 and 2024 to pre-pandemic lows. Some violent crimes, including homicides, surged at the end of the first Trump administration during the COVID-19 pandemic to the highest levels in decades.
According to an excerpt of the FBI report shared by the White House before the speech, murder and non-negligent manslaughter decreased an estimated 18.1% in 2025 while robberies fell an estimated 18.5%.
"President Trump promised to make America safe again and the data proves he has done just that," White House spokeswoman Lauren Bis said.
FBI Director Kash Patel and newly sworn-in Attorney General Todd Blanche joined the president at the event with police.
The decline has occurred in cities big and small, in places with officials touting both aggressive policing and progressive police reform and with both a high and low density of police officers, suggesting that no single policy explains the nationwide trend.
“This is a case in which success truly has a thousand fathers, not just one,” Council on Criminal Justice President and CEO Adam Gelb said. “Everybody is looking for a single easy explanation and that doesn’t exist. There is no magic wand. It’s happening all over the map across the nation and around the globe.”
Trump has long complained of a "crime epidemic," particularly in Democratic-run cities, and used that message to justify aggressive federal intervention, including last year's deployment of federal agents and National Guard troops to Washington. He has also recently intensified attacks on self-described democratic socialist New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani and other progressive candidates who oppose the administration's tactics.
Democrats say Republicans are overstating the role of federal policy in a crime decline that began before Trump returned to office, and progressives have largely backed away from supporting the "defund the police" movement that emerged after George Floyd's murder in 2020.
They now say policing should be reformed while arguing that immigration officers, who have killed two U.S. citizens, have made communities less safe.
(Reporting by Humeyra Pamuk; Additional reporting by Dan Rosenzweig-Ziff and Brad Heath; Editing by Colleen Jenkins, Stephen Coates and David Gaffen)
