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Number murders is expected to decline for the third year in a row — despite President-elect Donald Trump fence that the nation suffers from high crime rates.
Although Trump said in a Truth Social post on Thursday that the US is “breaking apart” with violence, blaming the “open borders” of the current administration, data shows that the rate of violence crime and homicide actually plummeted in 2024.
Data from the Real Time Crime Index from January to October 2024, collected from over 300 law enforcement agencies across the country, reveals that homicide rates have declined by almost 16 percent compared to 2023 and by almost 25 percent compared to 2022 in the same periods. Overall violent crime is also down 3.3 percent in 2024 from 2023, according to the index.
Although there is still data from the end of the year to consider, experts predict that these trends will continue.
“Given where we were just three or four years ago (shortly after Trump was in the White House), we’re basically looking at 5,000 fewer homicide victims than in 2020, 2021 and 2022, which happened in 2024. ,” Jeff Asher, co-founder of AH Datalytics and a former criminal analyst for the CIA and the New Orleans Police Department, said ABC News.
The positive news comes amid a string of recent high-profile homicide cases, including the slaying of a UnitedHealthcare executive in New York City, a woman who was fatally set on fire on a subway train and a driver who fatally plowed into a Crowds in New Orleans on New Year’s Day.
In full swing Attack on New Orleansin which 14 died and dozens were injured, many online – and even Fox News – speculated that the suspect is a migrant, but the FBI identified the driver as Shamsud Din JabbarAmerican citizen from Texas.
Nevertheless, the newly elected president links mass murder to immigration. On Wednesday, in the hours after the attack, Trump wrote on Truth Social: “When I said that the criminals coming in are far worse than the criminals we have in our country, that statement was constantly debunked by Democrats and fake media, but it turned out to be true. The crime rate in our country is at a level no one has ever seen before.”
On Thursday, he also blamed immigration when he claimed the country was “falling apart”.
“Our country is a disaster, a laughing stock in the whole world! This is what happens when you have OPEN BORDERS, with weak, ineffective and virtually non-existent leadership,” the 78-year-old Republican wrote. “The US is breaking down – a violent erosion of safety, national security and democracy is happening across our nation.”
Jabbar was killed after an exchange of fire with police, the FBI said. The federal agency is investigating the incident as an “act of terrorism” and notes that the suspect is carried the flag of ISIS.
Trump alluded to these details in a separate post Thursday, once again blaming the Biden administration’s immigration policies. During his 2024 campaign, Trump made unsubstantiated claims about the nation’s crime rate, at one point claiming that a “crime wave” taking place at levels “unseen before”, which is not supported by the data.
He wrote: “With Biden’s ‘open borders’ policy, I have said, many times at rallies and elsewhere, that radical Islamic terrorism and other forms of violent crime will become so bad in America that it will become hard to imagine or believe. That time has come, only worse than ever imagined.”
Statistics show that the crime rates of immigrants consistently lower than those of US citizens.