“Crime in the U.S. fell in 2025. Will the trend continue?” ran on the Christmas Eve edition of National Public Radio’s Morning Edition. But after months of coverage bashing President Trump for sending troops into cities to fight crime (i.e. “Do Trump's D.C. moves echo an authoritarian playbook?”) Trump gets no credit in reporter Meg Anderson’s good-news story about an issue he ran and won on -- fighting crime. Anderson’s written story (the broadcast version was briefer and somewhat less slanted) reversed the polarity of reality, pointing to the falling crimes rates as if they somehow discredited Trump’s actions and rhetoric, as opposed to the drops showing Trump’s tough-on-crime policy bearing fruit. Crime fell across much of the U.S. in 2025 — in the Midwest, the South, the Northeast and the West, in big cities and small towns, and in red and blue states. The number of murders saw a huge drop — about 20% fewer than in 2024, according to the Real Time Crime Index, which uses local crime data from nearly 600 jurisdictions around the country. Other violent crimes, including rape, robbery and aggravated assault, also declined, as did property crimes like motor vehicle theft and burglaries. "It's the best year in crime I've seen in 27 years in this business," says John Roman, who directs the Center on Public Safety & Justice at NORC, a research group at the University of Chicago. NPR spoke to researchers who study trends in crime, policing and criminal justice about the numbers. Here are some of their main takeaways this year — and what they expect in 2026. Under the subhead “What caused the drop in murders?” there was no mention of even the possibility that Trump’s acts of sending in the National Guard to crime-ridden Democrat-run cities could have had a positive effect, or mass deportations. Instead they cited Covid. Part of the reason, researchers say, is that the nation is over the hump of the pandemic. During 2020 and 2021, homicide rates surged across the U.S. Now the nation is simply on the other side of that surge. Trump only appeared in the story to have his rhetoric and anti-crime acts discredited under the subhead “Rhetoric vs. reality.” Some researchers pointed to a disconnect between the widespread decrease in crime, and President Trump's depictions of crime this year, particularly in Democrat-led cities. Trump called Chicago the "most dangerous city in the world" and said Washington, D.C., had been "overtaken by violent gangs." The two cities, and others, eventually became the focus of federal law enforcement surges aimed at cracking down on crime and immigration. Chicago and D.C. have historically had higher crime rates compared to many U.S. cities, but they have also both seen crime falling in recent years, like much of the rest of the country. Using the threat of crime to justify crackdowns should make Americans wary, said Tahir Duckett, who directs the Center for Innovations in Community Safety at Georgetown Law. "That's a dark story that we have heard told in history," he said, "justifications for repression of civil rights, justifications for seizing additional authority." Isn't it possible that Trump's acts caused the drop in crime? NPR doesn't even consider the idea. Sending in the Guard is "repression." Anderson’s pessimism spread into the future setting the groundwork to blame Trump’s government for a crime spike in 2026 (after not crediting him for the 2025 drop) via an unlabeled liberal source: Government funding cuts worry experts like Ames Grawert, senior counsel in the justice program at the Brennan Center for Justice. While NPR treated the correlation between the fall in crime and Trump policy as a coincidence not worth noting, the Daily Caller had a different take on the same data: President Donald Trump has made combating violent crime a top priority in his second term. In August, he issued an executive order declaring a crime emergency in Washington, .D.C, and ordered the National Guard deployed to help crack down. The city experienced nearly a 28% drop in murders this year, according to the RTCI.