Don't believe the narrative. Violent crime just had its biggest drop since 1937.

Your Sunday good news: you can ignore the talking heads. Just look at the data.

Hey everyone, happy Sunday.

For today’s Good News Sunday, I want to talk about something almost every American believes is getting worse — but actually is getting dramatically better.

Violent crime in the United States is falling. Not a little. A lot. And not for one year, but for three years in a row. We are living through one of the steepest declines in violent crime this country has ever seen.

I know that doesn’t square with what you’ve been hearing. I know how the script goes. Crime is up, the cities are burning, lock your doors. It moves voters, it moves ratings, and it has remarkably little to do with what the data actually shows.

So let’s look at the data.

In 2023, murder fell nearly 12%. At the time, that was the largest one-year decline the FBI had ever recorded.

Then in 2024 it fell another 15%. The overall violent crime rate dropped to its lowest level since 1969. Robbery sat near a 20-year low. Every category, every region, big cities and small towns alike.

And the preliminary 2025 numbers released this spring? Murder down another 18%. Robbery down another 18.5%. The bureau itself called it the single largest decrease in violent crime and murder since 1937.

Now I’ll be straight with you — there is a fight going on right now over who gets the credit, and I’ll just point out that this turnaround began in 2022 and has continued since then. This isn’t a White House story. It’s an America story.

The ER doctors and trauma nurses who save a kid’s life at 3 a.m. and then put a counselor in front of him before he leaves the hospital — a handoff that, done right, dramatically lowers the odds he’s ever back in that trauma bay again.

The men and women who stand in the gap — many of them formerly incarcerated themselves — who walk into the toughest corners of the country and put themselves between two kids about to throw their lives away.

The mentors. The pastors. The mothers walking their blocks at night because they’re tired of burying their neighbors’ children.

The cops who stayed on the job through the hardest years for American policing in a generation. A lot of their friends quit. A lot of departments were short-staffed. They showed up anyway and they deserve our thanks.

This story isn’t really about crime. It’s about what we still believe is possible.

Belief is not a small thing. If you believe nothing works, you stop trying. If you believe your neighbors are your enemies, you stop helping them. If you believe the country is past saving, you start acting like it.

But things are heading in the right direction. Not perfectly. Not everywhere. But measurably, and for long enough now that it isn’t a fluke. Murder at a 60-year low. Violent crime at a 60-year low. The steepest drop in nearly a century. And we as Americans should act like we are a nation capable of not just incremental improvement, but of great things and big changes. Because we are.

That, my friends, is good news for your Sunday.

— Adam