Homicides in the US have fallen dramatically in recent years after a spike during the Covid-19 pandemic, but now some advocates for community violence intervention programs worry federal funding cuts 2025, more than $800m in grants was cut from the Department of Justice’s office of justice programs aimed at preventing and responding to gun violence, among other causes. While the justice department justified the cuts “prosecuting criminals”, some experts argue that intervention programs are more effective at reducing violence than simply making arrests. “We saw historic reductions in homicides, which means that countless fewer families had to bury loved ones,” said Shani Buggs, an assistant professor at the University of California, Davis, who studies community violence prevention. “It is beyond disheartening that rather than investing and [studying] what worked and pouring into what worked, we are doing the opposite.” In 2020, when the pandemic started, the US saw its murder rate increase 30% over 2019, the largest-ever recorded increase, according to the FBI.
That happened because of the Covid lockdown, experts say. “The clearest explanation for why homicide and violence increased so rapidly across the entire country during the pandemic is that large numbers of young men and teen boys in high poverty, higher violence neighborhoods were pushed out of work and out of school,” said Rhett Morris, who co-authored a Brookings Institution report on homicides during the pandemic. Violent crime started to ease during the second half of the Biden administration and the downward trend has continued since Trump took office. In 2025, there were 25% fewer homicides in the US than in 2019, according to a report from the Council on Criminal Justice, a non-partisan thinktank.
The New York police department also reported that the city saw its fewest murders in recorded history during the first four months of this year. Even though the recent crime drop started under Biden, the Trump administration has portrayed the progress as something that began once he took office and linked it to his deployment of national guard troops to US cities. Trump was also president when violent crime surged in 2020. “This is the direct result of President Trump’s aggressive, no-nonsense approach to public safety,” the White House stated in February.
“ , removing savage criminal illegals from our streets, supporting police and prosecutors, and rejecting the Radical Left’s weakness, President Trump’s decisive actions have turned the tide.” But experts dispute those claims, not only because things started getting better before Trump returned, but also because crime dropped significantly in cities like Baltimore, Buffalo and Salt Lake City, where he did not send the national guard. Crime in those cities decreased 40% in 2025 compared with 2019, according to the Council on Criminal Justice. “We have seen significant drops in violent crime in cities without any deployments,” and “we have seen drops in crime in cities that have had the deployments, so it doesn’t seem like that has been a critical factor,” Morris said. In 2022, Biden approved the bipartisan Safer Communities Act, which provided $250m for the community-based violence intervention and prevention initiative.
The government then provided grants to organizations such as Baltimore’s LifeBridge Health, which utilized community members to mediate conflicts and prevent shootings, and the Urban Peace Institute in Los Angeles, which trained Black and Latino community members to become violence interrupters. The Trump administration terminated grants worth millions of dollars to Urban Peace, LifeBridge and at least two other Baltimore organizations dedicated to violence intervention, according to Giffords, a gun violence prevention organization. They did so even though Baltimore saw the largest homicide rate decrease between 2019 and 2025 among 35 cities in the Council on Criminal Justice study. The city’s success demonstrates “what happens when you pour resources into a strategic plan that is focused on a really comprehensive approach to public safety”, Buggs said.