There’s a good chance the United States will see the lowest murder rate it has ever recorded this year, a major change from the early pandemic, when killings skyrocketed. In 2023 and 2024, homicides fell at what appears to be a record pace—and they’re continuing to plummet so far in 2025, according to a recent report by crime data analyst Jeff Asher. There’s a “strong possibility,” he writes, that the country could see fewer than 4.45 murders per 100,000 people in 2025—besting the record low from 2014, which was similar to the rates recorded all the way back in 1962, when the FBI first started tracking data like this. The extreme decline is happening nationally, with most cities trending in the same direction. No one knows for sure why we’re seeing this shift. But given that killings increased so dramatically in 2020, when the pandemic first struck and cities went into lockdown, Asher and some other criminologists suspect that murders started receding when local governments resumed normal operations and began investing again in jobs, infrastructure, and violence prevention programming. Interestingly, the plunge in homicides probably wasn’t driven by a decrease in guns (they’re still everywhere) or an increase in police, Asher writes: There are far fewer cops today in most big and medium-sized cities than there were before the pandemic. Meanwhile, while Americans as a whole are killing less, America’s police are doing the opposite. The number of people fatally shot by cops has increased every year since 2020—in 2024, officers killed at least 1,226 people nationwide, an 18 percent increase over 2019, according to an analysis by the New York Times that drew on data from the Washington Post and the nonprofit Mapping Police Violence. The uptick in police violence hasn’t occurred everywhere. Many Democratic-leaning states that enacted reforms after George Floyd’s death in 2020 saw police killings fall slightly in the years afterward, according to Samuel Sinyangwe, the data scientist who leads Mapping Police Violence. But Republican-leaning states that didn’t enact reforms saw major increases. “There has been a backlash to the protests,” Sinyangwe says, referring to the countless demonstrations sparked by Floyd’s murder, “whereby Red states further funded and encouraged more aggressive policing practices and imposed barriers on local jurisdictions trying to enact reforms.” The federal government seems unconcerned by police homicides. In April, President Donald Trump signed an executive order with the goal of “strengthening and unleashing law enforcement,” and his Justice Department is no longer investigating police departments accused of excessive force. “Safe communities rely on the backbone and heroism of a tough and well-equipped police force,” the order states. The data, it seems, tells a different story.

Five years ago today, George Floyd, a 46-year-old unarmed Black man, was murdered by Derek Chauvin, a white police officer, in Minneapolis. The harrowing footage of the murder—in which Chauvin kneeled on Floyd’s neck for more than nine minutes after a nearby store clerk alleged he tried to purchase cigarettes with a counterfeit $20 bill—sparked nationwide protests over police brutality against Black people, and the persistence of anti-Black racism more broadly. Chauvin was found guilty on all charges in the case and sentenced to more than 20 years in prison; three other officers who were also on the scene and failed to get Floyd help as he struggled to breathe were found guilty of federal civil rights violations and sentenced from 30 to 42 months in prison. But a new report from the New York Times, coupled with recent actions from the Trump administration, suggests that whatever progress appeared to come in the wake of Floyd’s murder was not lasting. A New York Times analysis published Saturday, based on data from the Washington Post and the database Mapping Police Violence, found that the number of police killings nationwide has risen every year since 2020—with Black people constituting a disproportionate number of the victims. Last year, for example, there were a total of 1,226 people killed by police, an 18 percent increase from 2019, the Times found. While most of the victims killed by police reportedly were armed, some, like Floyd, were not. Last year, 53 unarmed people were killed by police, compared to 95 in 2020, according to the Times analysis. Over the past decade, Black people have been killed by police at more than two times the rate of white people. (Native Americans were the racial group with the highest rate of police killings, according to the Times data.) The rates of police killings were higher—and have increased since 2020—in the redder states that President Donald Trump won in the last election; the bluer states that former Vice President Kamala Harris won, on the other hand, saw stabilized rates of police killings since 2020. The actions of the Trump administration do not inspire confidence that those numbers will decrease anytime soon. This week, the Department of Justice announced it was dismissing lawsuits and consent decrees against police departments in Minneapolis, where Floyd was murdered, and in Louisville, Kentucky, where police killed Breonna Taylor in March 2020. (Officials in Minneapolis and Louisville said they would continue working to implement police reforms.) The DOJ also announced it was ending Biden-era investigations into a half dozen other police departments that the prior administration accused of constitutional violations. Civil rights groups said those moves would likely worsen police violence; the ACLU said Trump’s DOJ was sending “a message that the government is willing to look away from harm being inflicted on our communities—even when the harm is plain as day.” Those shifts come as the Trump administration has also prioritized the abolishment of diversity, equity, and inclusion policies, or DEI, across the federal government and beyond. The current political climate may help explain why more than 70 percent of adults recently surveyed by the Pew Research Center said they do not believe the increased focus on race following Floyd’s murder made Black Americans’ lives better. And the amount of Americans who say they support the Black Lives Matter movement has dropped 15 points since 2020, though a majority—52 percent—still say they are in favor of it, according to Pew. On Sunday, various Democratic lawmakers commemorated Floyd’s passing on social media, including Minnesotans Gov. Tim Walz and Rep. Ilhan Omar, along with Rep. Ayanna Pressley (D-Mass.), Rep. Monica McIver (D-N.J.), Rep. Jasmine Crockett (D-Texas), and Sen. Raphael Warnock (D-Ga.). Crockett, Omar, and McIver called on Congress to pass the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act, a bill first introduced in 2021 that would increase accountability for law enforcement. Its measures include creating a national registry to track police misconduct, limiting no-knock warrants and chokeholds, and requiring training on implicit bias and racial profiling for law enforcement officers. The bill was most recently reintroduced in the House last year by Rep. Sheila Jackson-Lee (D-Texas), but it failed to get a vote. Mother Jones video correspondent Garrison Hayes sees reasons for hope, despite the limits to the progress of the past five years: > If 2020 was The Awakening, and the last four years have been The Retrenchment, > then 2025 may mark the beginning of a new phase: The Reevaluation. > > I think the 2020 BLM protests were about bolstering Black social and political > power, and despite all of the attacks that effort has endured, Black people > aren’t giving up on it any time soon. > > In Louisiana, Black voters helped defeat a constitutional amendment that would > have made it easier to try children as adults — a move that many viewed as a > veiled attempt to deepen mass incarceration. > > We’re seeing it in economic protest too, with Black consumers leading boycotts > of major corporations like Target, disrupting profit margins and forcing > boardroom conversations. > > And we’re seeing it in grassroots organizing. Activists like Angela Rye and > journalist Joy Reid are crisscrossing the country on the State of the People > Power Tour, mobilizing and educating Black communities on how to build lasting > political power from the ground up. > > > > So, five years later, when we ask what’s changed, maybe the most honest answer > is that we changed; and that might be the most powerful change of all.

It’s been five years since George Floyd was murdered on a Minneapolis street in the Spring on 2020. Though far from novel, this particular act of state violence shocked the world and ignited one of the largest protest movements in modern history. In my latest video, I argue that this moment was much bigger than Floyd; from the horrors of the Middle Passage to the chains of mass incarceration, from slave codes to Jim Crow, the full weight of America’s long-standing commitment to anti-Blackness bore down on that moment and the months of protest that followed. People were energized: books written about Black authors topped the New York Times‘ bestseller lists, corporations pledged billions of dollars toward racial justice, and diversity, equity and inclusion practitioners were in high demand. From London to Lagos to Los Angeles, the world seemed to unite under one banner: Black Lives really do Matter. But five years later, it’s worth asking: What actually changed? The answer is complicated. In many ways, the mass awakening of 2020 gave way to a powerful retrenchment over the four years that followed. A year after the world marched for George Floyd, conservative politicians and pundits began rallying against so-called “Critical Race Theory”an academic field of study based on the honest examination of racism’s historical and present-day impact on society—and twisted it into a catch-all for anything conservatives didn’t like. Within a couple of years, Republican-led book bans would target bestselling titles that once spurred on a America’s “racial reckoning.” Nowhere is that clearer than in the debate over of police reform: the most substantive policy demand of the Black Lives Matter protests. Despite efforts by lawmakers like Senator Cory Booker and then-Senator Kamala Harris to introduce police reform legislation as early as June 2020, Congress ultimately failed to pass a bill curbing chokeholds, no-knock warrants, or qualified immunity. Instead, in many cities, police budgets grew and a dozen states have broken ground on large-scale police training centers — dubbed “Cop Cities” by critics. The penultimate act of America’s racial retrenchment came in the fall of 2024 when Donald Trump, buoyed by replacement theory fears and anti-“woke” campaign ads, was reelected president of the United States of America. We’ve seen the rapid deterioration of civil rights protections, a commitment to arming police with surplus military gear, and the cancellation of Biden-era federal investigations into the police departments involved in the deaths of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor. All while his most vocal supporters call for a federal pardon for Derek Chauvin, the officer convicted of murdering Floyd. Yet, despite all of this, I think there is still reason for hope. If 2020 was The Awakening, and the last four years have been The Retrenchment, then 2025 may mark the beginning of a new phase: The Reevaluation. I think the 2020 BLM protests were about bolstering Black social and political power, and despite all of the attacks that effort has endured, Black people aren’t giving up on it any time soon. In Louisiana, Black voters helped defeat a constitutional amendment that would have made it easier to try children as adults — a move that many viewed as a veiled attempt to deepen mass incarceration. We’re seeing it in economic protest too, with Black consumers leading boycotts of major corporations like Target, disrupting profit margins and forcing boardroom conversations. And we’re seeing it in grassroots organizing. Activists like Angela Rye and journalist Joy Reid are crisscrossing the country on the State of the People Power Tour, mobilizing and educating Black communities on how to build lasting political power from the ground up. So, five years later, when we ask what’s changed, maybe the most honest answer is that we changed; and that might be the most powerful change of all.

Mike Hixenbaugh first knew things had changed when someone on a four-wheeler started ripping up his lawn after his wife placed a Black Lives Matter sign outside their home on the suburban outskirts of Houston. Hixenbaugh is an award-winning investigative reporter for NBC News. He’s covered wrongdoing within the child welfare system, safety lapses inside hospitals, and deadly failures in the US Navy. But when his front yard was torn apart in the summer of 2020 in the wake of the George Floyd protests, he saw a story about race and politics collide at his own front door. “They’re targeting us,” Hixenbaugh recalls. “My wife, my kids, me—and it’s about race.”  So like any investigative journalist, he started investigating and soon discovered that “the ugliness of our national politics was really playing out at the most visceral level in these suburbs.” Hixenbaugh’s reporting about the growing divides in his neighborhood soon led him to the public schools, specifically those in Southlake, Texas, a suburb of Dallas where parents were engaged in heated, emotional battles over race, gender, DEI programs, and the role of public education in the US. As more than a dozen states sue the Trump administration over its policies aimed at ending public schools’ diversity, equity, and inclusion programs, More To The Story host Al Letson talks with Hixenbaugh about how America’s public schools have become “a microcosm” for the country’s political and cultural fights—“a way of zooming in deep into one community to try to tell the story of America.” Subscribe to Mother Jones podcasts on Apple Podcasts or your favorite podcast app. Find More To The Story on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, iHeartRadio, Pandora, or your favorite podcast app.

President Trump’s baseless claims that diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives are responsible for the tragic, late-night plane collision in Washington, DC are not the first time he’s peddled conspiracy theories as the nation reels from a crisis. In the past, Trump has also boosted false and disproven claims in the aftermath of terrorist attacks, a national pandemic, police brutality, and natural disasters. We took a disturbing and conspiratorial trip down memory lane so you don’t have to. 9/11 Trump has promoted a lot of falsehoods and unfounded claims about the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks that killed more than 2,900 people and injured thousands more: He claimed in 2015 that he saw “thousands and thousands” of Arab people in New Jersey celebrating the attacks, a claim for which there is no evidence; he also claimed that from his apartment in Trump Tower—located four miles from the World Trade Center—he watched people jump from the burning towers. He also said he “helped clear the rubble” at Ground Zero and that he lost “hundreds of friends” in the attacks—but there is no evidence to support either statement. > Trump claims he helped clear rubble and search for survivors on 9/11: > pic.twitter.com/G3yodnBMK2 > > — Angelo Carusone (@GoAngelo) April 19, 2016 In 2022, he claimed, “Nobody’s gotten to the bottom of 9/11, unfortunately”—despite the fact that the FBI characterizes its investigation into 9/11 as its most ambitious ever, and says that it involved more than 4,000 special agents and 3,000 professional employees. And, of course, last September, he brought Laura Loomer—an avowed 9/11 conspiracy theorist—to a somber memorial to commemorate the tragedy, as my colleague Abby Vesoulis reported at the time. Central Park Five case After the brutal rape and assault of a 28-year-old female jogger in Central Park in 1989 that made headlines across the country, Trump took out a full-page ad in four major New York newspapers suggesting that five Black and Latino teenagers who were accused of the crime should face the death penalty. The wrongly accused men spent between 6 and 13 years in prison. A convicted murderer and rapist eventually admitted, in 2002, to being responsible for the attack—and DNA evidence corroborated the confession. But that didn’t stop Trump from doubling down on his beliefs that they were guilty during his 2016 presidential campaign. Around the same time, Yusef Salaam, one of the exonerees who has since been elected to the New York City Council, told Mother Jones that he believed Trump played a role in their conviction, adding that his newspaper ad facilitated “the conviction that was going to happen in the public arena prior to us even getting into the courthouse.” Hillary Clinton and the Benghazi attack During the 2016 campaign, Trump repeatedly claimed that after the September 2012 attacks by an Islamic militant group on US government facilities in Benghazi, Libya—which killed four Americans, including the US Ambassador—then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton went to sleep rather than help lead the American response. But Clinton testified before a House Select Committee in 2015 that she “did not sleep all night”—and as the nonpartisan FactCheck.org points out, evidence shows she was fully engaged in the immediate response. Hurricane Sandy and birtherism After Hurricane Sandy hit the eastern seaboard in October 2012, devastating New York and New Jersey and killing at least 147 people, Trump claimed that it was “good luck” for then-President Obama, who was running for reelection: “He will buy the election by handing out billions of dollars,” Trump wrote on X, presumably referring to disaster aid. Not only that, Trump also used it as an opportunity to again promote the racist birther conspiracy theory he originally pioneered, falsely claiming that Obama was not born in the US. Just a week earlier, Trump had claimed he would make a $5 million donation to a charity of Obama’s choice if the president released his “college records and applications…and passport applications and records” by Oct. 31—even though Obama had released his longform birth certificate the year before, which showed he was born in Hawaii. After Hurricane Sandy hit, on Oct. 30, Trump posted on X, “Because of the hurricane, I am extending my 5 million dollar offer for President Obama’s favorite charity.” Obama does not appear to have responded. In September 2016, while running for president, Trump finally admitted Obama was born in the US—then promptly, and falsely, claimed it was his then-opponent, Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, who started the conspiracy theory. Death tolls in Hurricanes Irma and Maria A year after Hurricanes Irma and Maria hit Puerto Rico in 2017, leading to more than 3,000 deaths, Trump rejected the death toll and said that it was “done by the Democrats in order to make me look as bad as possible.” The nonpartisan fact-checking website Politifact states that researchers warned the preliminary estimates of death tolls from the Puerto Rican government—ranging from 16 to 64 people dead—were undercounts, and that the higher numbers came from indirect deaths, caused by something like the loss of electricity for someone who relies on medical devices, for example. COVID-19 and…a lot Who could forget Trump’s litany of unhinged and disproven theories about COVID-19? He initially downplayed the danger of it, claiming in February 2020 that it was “very much under control in the USA.” But just a few months later, he was wondering aloud at a press briefing if people could cure themselves of the coronavirus by injecting themselves with disinfectant or exposing the insides of their bodies to ultraviolet light, as my colleague Madison Pauly covered. (The next day, following an outcry, the White House walked back Trump’s claims, saying Americans should consult with their doctors to treat COVID-19; Trump also claimed the comments were “sarcastic.”) > …WHAT pic.twitter.com/CCOYIsfSm7 > > — Pod Save America (@PodSaveAmerica) April 23, 2020 Trump also promoted the controversial drug hydroxychloroquine as a potential COVID-19 treatment—though leading medical organizations, including the World Health Organization and the Mayo Clinic, recommend against using it as a treatment for, or form of prevention against, COVID-19. (That didn’t stop Trump from taking it—though he still got the virus months after doing so.) > I have no words that can prepare you for what you're about to watch. > pic.twitter.com/aov2F8DpRs > > — Mother Jones (@MotherJones) May 18, 2020 Trump also reposted false claims from other accounts on X stating that the COVID-19 death toll was vastly overblown, which Anthony Fauci promptly shut down. Trump and his son, Eric, also claimed that Democratic officials were prolonging lockdowns to prevent him from being able to hold in-person campaign rallies. All this makes it no surprise that, as my colleague David Corn reported back in 2020, a Cornell University study analyzing 38 million English-language articles about the coronavirus concluded that Trump was the largest driver of the so-called “infodemic,” or COVID-19-related misinformation. “The biggest surprise,” Sarah Evanega, the study’s lead author, told the New York Times, “was that the president of the United States was the single largest driver of misinformation around Covid.” Protests in the aftermath of George Floyd’s murder by police After George Floyd‘s murder by Minneapolis police in May 2020 sparked nationwide protests against anti-Black racism and police brutality, Trump promoted a variety of baseless claims about the protesters, calling them “thugs” who were being funded by Democrats and billionaire George Soros, and threatening them. “When the looting starts, the shooting starts,” he said at the time. In just one example, Trump claimed a 75-year-old Buffalo man who was hospitalized after police shoved him to the ground “could be an ANTIFA provocateur” and alleged it “could be a setup”—despite there being no evidence for these claims. The man, Martin Gugino, reportedly spent about a month in the hospital for his injuries; the police officers involved were suspended without pay and then arrested, but the charges were dropped after a grand jury declined to indict them in 2021. LA wildfires After devastating wildfires broke out in Los Angeles earlier this month, killing at least 29 people and destroying thousands of structures, Trump boosted a variety of baseless claims—including that Gov. Newsom (D-Calif.) was to blame for a water shortage, though state officials have shut that down. More recently, Trump tried to fashion himself as a savior again, claiming that under his direction the US military “turned on the water” supply from the Pacific Northwest; in an epic clap back, the California Department of Water Resources said that never happened. “The military did not enter California,” the agency posted on X. “The federal government restarted federal water pumps after they were offline for maintenance for three days. State water supplies in Southern California remain plentiful.”