Crime is down across the United States and the City of St. Louis is keeping up with—and in some key areas even outpacing—the national trend.
This is according to the Washington, D.C.-based Council on Criminal Justice’s Year-End 2025 Crime Trends report, which was released this morning and compares crime trends across major American cities.
Get a fresh take on the day’s top news
Subscribe to the St. Louis Daily newsletter for a smart, succinct guide to local news from award-winning journalists Sarah Fenske and Ryan Krull.
The most notable finding in the report is that the number of homicides St. Louis experienced in 2025 was about 11 percent lower than 2024. This was in line with the national trend: Thirty-one of the 35 cities the report looked at saw a decrease in homicides from the year prior. (Little Rock was a notable outlier, with a marked increase.) St. Louis’ 11 percent drop actually put it near the back of the pack of cities seeing a reduction in homicides from 2024 to 2025.
However, St. Louis was well ahead of most other cities when comparing 2025 crime rates to pre-pandemic rates in 2019. In that timeframe, St. Louis saw a 40 percent drop in homicides, more than 27 of the other 34 cities in the report.
It’s worth noting that CCJ relied on a slightly different number for homicides in St. Louis in 2025 than the SLMPD’s official tally. The CCJ’s number came in at 121. The SLMPD’s stood at 139. This sort of discrepancy between the CCJ’s number and local law enforcement is not uncommon; CCJ attributes it to additional checks they perform on data directly from law enforcement, as well as differences arising from “updating, a lack of updating, or slight variations in offense definitions.” However, even with the police department’s less favorable number, the 2019 to 2025 decrease in homicides still comes in at a hair under 30 percent.
The report from the CCJ backs up the reduction that local leaders have touted in the early weeks of the new year. Mayor Cara Spencer has attributed the drop in crime to “collaboration across city government and the tireless efforts of officers.”
The CCJ report also compared St. Louis’ trends in aggravated assaults, robberies, larcenies and motor vehicle thefts to other cities. In those stats, the picture mostly looked good for St. Louis as well.
Aggravated assaults in the city were down 28 percent compared to 2019 and robberies were down 60 percent, trends that outpaced most other cities in the report. Motor vehicle thefts, however, were virtually unchanged, down less than one percent, over that same time.
The report stresses that it is difficult to identify a cause for the nationwide drop in crime, though it posits two potential factors. The first is a reduction in substance abuse, in particular as it relates to alcohol consumption. The other trend the report notes is a drop in what’s called “acquisitive crime,” which refers to crimes in which the motivating factor is the perpetrator’s need for money. The drop in this type of crime is likely due to fewer people carrying cash. Much acquisitive crime has also moved into the realm of cyberspace, the report notes.
