The declining murder rate.
Tangle
Isaac Saul
4.7 • 817 Ratings
🗓️ 11 February 2026
⏱️ 32 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
In January 2026, the Council on Criminal Justice (CCJ) released a report finding that murders and violent crimes in the United States decreased significantly in 2025. According to the report, the murder rate in 35 large U.S. cities fell 21% last year — the biggest one-year drop ever — to what could be its lowest level since 1900. Furthermore, 11 of 13 types of violent crime tracked by CCJ all decreased in 2025; drug crimes increased by 7% while the rate of sexual crimes remained unchanged.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | From executive producer Isaac Saul, this is Tangle. |
| 0:08.4 | Good morning, good afternoon and good evening and welcome to the Tangle podcast, a place where you get views from across the political spectrum, some independent thinking, and a little bit of our take. |
| 0:30.7 | I am your host today, senior editor, Will Kayback. |
| 0:33.8 | Every now and then, usually on Wednesdays or sometime in the middle of the week, we pick what we call a flex topic to be our main story. |
| 0:42.2 | And the idea here is pretty simple. |
| 0:44.2 | It's a story that may not be in the immediate news cycle or the immediate headlines, but it's come up repeatedly in the issues that we've covered in the past few months. |
| 0:53.0 | We've seen a range of interesting commentary about it from the right and left. |
| 0:56.8 | And we've also seen some expert commentary and insight that we think could bolster our coverage |
| 1:01.4 | and give it a little bit more depth. |
| 1:03.6 | So today is going to be one of those days where we cover a flex topic. |
| 1:07.0 | And the issue is the U.S. murder rate, specifically the precipitous decline in the U.S. murder rate over the past three years or so. |
| 1:15.5 | Now, there are a lot of competing theories about exactly why the murder rate and really the overall violent crime rate in the United States has decreased so much in the past three years and seems to have had |
| 1:28.4 | one of its highest ever drops just in the past year. And that's coming after a spiking crime that |
| 1:34.0 | we saw during the first couple years of the pandemic around 2020 and 2021. So one of the things |
| 1:39.9 | that we're going to get into today is exactly what those different theories are and the different |
| 1:44.1 | evidence and data that backs it up. I'm going to offer a few likely explanations that I've seen |
| 1:48.9 | based on my research. And then we're also going to talk about the possibility that the answer is |
| 1:53.4 | really a combination of many different causal factors instead of a single one. So we're excited to get |
| 1:58.8 | into it a little bit more of a policy discussion today, but it should be interesting and obviously |
| 2:03.6 | hinges on some very tangible real-world issues. |
| 2:06.6 | So we hope you enjoy it. |
| 2:08.3 | Before we do get into the main topic, though, I want to flag that we have a new YouTube |
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