The Best News in America

 

“I lived in Baltimore for a brief time just before the Great Recession, when the city seemed like a great experiment in gentrifying can-do — the wealth spillover from Washington, D.C., funding youthful forays in exposed-brick living, top-to-bottom renovations of long-abandoned townhouses, tapas restaurants and gastro pubs springing up just blocks from zones of dereliction. (Ever since, I’ve had a weird nostalgic response to the middling rom-com “He’s Just Not That Into You,” which was filmed against this backdrop.)

 

One night a friend reported an inner revelation at a lavish happy hour near the Inner Harbor. This can’t last, he told us. He was right.

 

First the financial crisis cut the flow of money. Then, after Freddy Gray died in police custody in 2015, Baltimore experienced what the rest of the country experienced in 2020 — a surge in protest and rioting, a police retreat, and a murder spike that made the city’s pre-existing problems bad enough to make “The Wire” seem like a good-government documentary. By the time the national homicide rate neared a pandemic-era high point in 2020, Baltimore’s murder rate was about eight times the American average.

 

Today, though, the city is a different leading indicator: In the last few years it’s become a case study in how remarkably and rapidly crime rates can fall. In 2008, the end of what I remember as Baltimore’s halcyon days, there were 234 murders in the city. By 2019, there were 348. In 2025, there were just 133.

 

The national trend is similar and striking. There are many ways in which America in 2026 is not experiencing the “golden age” that our president promised upon his re-accession to the White House. But with crime rates, there’s at least an argument that we’re headed there. Murder rates haven’t just fallen back from the heights they hit during the Covid-era urban crisis. They’ve fallen to a point where the crime analyst Jeff Asher can plausibly predict that this year might have the lowest homicide rate ever recorded in F.B.I. statistics.

 

This comes, yes, with various caveats (more on those below), but it’s still a remarkable turnabout from the disaster of five short years ago. And looking at Baltimore helps us understand the role that policy can play.

 

As Charles Fain Lehman writes in a recent essay for The Free Press, there seem to be two special components to the city’s success. One is a targeted program that intervenes with particularly violence-prone Baltimoreans (young men with gang connections and continuing feuds) and offers both sticks and carrots, a promise that the cops are watching joined to various forms of social service help. The other is a sharp turn by the new city prosecutor away from the soft-on-crime, anti-carceral approach of Peak Woke.

 

Progressives are more likely to highlight the targeted interventions, while conservatives are more likely to praise the tougher-on-crime prosecutor. There’s a synthesis there, as Lehman notes — but I think it still favors the conservative position, insofar as the willingness to actually imprison people seems foundational, with the effectiveness of social service liberalism built atop a bedrock commitment to public order.

 

But if part of what’s happening is post-2020 policymakers groping their way back to common sense, another part of the story is the deeper, pre-political forces that should be driving crime rates lower under any political conditions.

 

This is where it makes sense to caveat the news of a potential all-time (or all-measured-time) low in American murder rates. Relative to the 1960s or 1980s or almost any prior era, we ought to expect a lower murder rate today, for three big reasons: American society is older than ever and violent crimes are mostly committed by young people, American society is much more surveilled than in the past and young Americans today spend way more time inside and online.

 

These forces should make the murder spike we just lived through seem that much more unusual and terrible. But they also limit how much credit any mayor, prosecutor or bureaucracy can reasonably take for pushing the trend downward once again.

 

Just as a core fact about today’s America, though, the low-crime trend itself deserves to be more widely known. My conversational orbit is filled with people convinced that our nation is trending inexorably toward internal ruin, that our social order is dystopian or unsalvageable. Meanwhile, outside America, from Europe to China, a vision of the United States as a violence-plagued Hobbesian nightmare often serves as anti-American comfort food.

 

A low murder rate is by no means the only measure of a good society, especially when it’s influenced by aging and digital isolation. But it’s a pretty good measure of a society’s underlying stability. A safer Baltimore is not automatically a rejuvenated Baltimore. But it’s a necessary precondition for a lot of possibilities, and a foundation on which rejuvenation can take shape.” [1]

 

1. The Best News in America: Ross Douthat.  New York Times (Online) New York Times Company. May 30, 2026.