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Data collected from 35 American cities showed a 21% decrease in the homicide rate from 2024 to 2025, translating to about 922 fewer homicides last year, according to a new report from the independent Council on Criminal Justice.The report, released on Thursday, tracked 13 crimes and recorded drops last year in 11 of those categories including carjackings, shoplifting, aggravated assaults and others. Drug crimes saw a small increase over last year and sexual assaults stayed even between 2024 and 2025, the study found.Experts said cities and states beyond those surveyed showed similar declines in homicides and other crimes. But they said it’s too early to tell what is prompting the change even as elected officials at all levels both Democrats and Republicans have been claiming credit.Adam Gelb, president and CEO of the council a nonpartisan think tank for criminal justice policy and research said that after historic increases in violence during the COVID-19 pandemic, this year brought historic decreases. The study found some cities recorded decades-low numbers, with the overall homicide rate dropping to its lowest in decades.“It’s a dramatic drop to an absolutely astonishing level. As we celebrate it we also need to unpack and try to understand it,” Gelb said. “There’s never one reason crime goes up or down.”The council collects data from police departments and other law enforcement sources. Some of the report categories included data from as many as 35 cities, while others because of differences in definitions for specific crimes or tracking gaps, include fewer cities in their totals. Many of the property crimes in the report also declined, including a 27% drop in vehicle thefts and 10% drop in shoplifting among the reporting cities.The council’s report showed a decrease in the homicide rate in 31 of 35 cities including a 40% decrease or more in Denver, Omaha, Nebraska, and Washington. The only city included that reported a double-digit increase was Little Rock, Arkansas, where the rate increased by 16% from 2024.Gelb said the broad crime rate decreases have made some criminologists question historic understandings of what drives trends in violent crime and how to battle it.“We want to believe that local factors really matter for crime numbers, that it is fundamentally a neighborhood problem with neighborhood level solutions,” he said. “We’re now seeing that broad, very broad social, cultural and economic forces at the national level can assert huge influence on what happens at the local level.”Republicans, many of whom called the decrease in violent crime in many cities in 2024 unreliable, have rushed to say that tough-on-crime stances like deploying the National Guard to cities like New Orleans and the nation’s capital, coupled with immigration operation surges, have all played a role in this year’s drops.However, cities that saw no surges of either troops or federal agents saw similar historic drops in violent and other crimes, according to the Council’s annual report.Democratic mayors are also touting their policies as playing roles in the 2025 decreases.Jens Ludwig, a public policy professor and the Director of the University of Chicago Crime Lab, stressed that many factors can contribute to a reduction in crime, whether that’s increased spending on law enforcement or increased spending on education to improve graduation rates.“The fact that in any individual city, we are seeing crime drop across so many neighborhoods and in so many categories, means it can’t be any particular pet project in a neighborhood enacted by a mayor,” Ludwig said. And because the decrease is happening in multiple cities, “it’s not like any individual mayor is a genius in figuring this out.”He said while often nobody knows what drives big swings in crime numbers, the decrease could be in part due to the continued normalization after big spikes in crime for several years during the pandemic. A hypothesis that stresses the declines might not last.“If you look at violent crime rates in the U.S., it is much more volatile year to year than the poverty rate, or the unemployment rate; It is one of those big social indicators that just swings around a lot year to year,” Ludwig said. “Regardless of credit for these declines, I think it’s too soon for anybody on either side of this to declare mission accomplished.” Claudia Lauer, Associated Press
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A new campaign launches today against AIs sticky fingers on copyrighted material. The Human Artistry Campaigns Stealing Isnt Innovation movement launches today with over 800 signatories. Those include many Hollywood actors, including Scarlett Johansson, Cate Blanchett, and Joseph Gordon-Levitt, as well as writers such as Jodi Picoult and Roxane Gay, and musicians like Cyndi Lauper and They Might be Giants. The campaign has a simple message: Stealing our work is not innovation. It’s not progress. It’s theftplain and simple. Many record labels, news outlets, and other creative entities have partnered with AI companies in recent years, despiteor possibly in response totheir propensity to mine copyrighted materials. Creatives have fought (and continue to fight) for protections, such as in the lengthy Writers Guild of America (WGA) and Screen Actors Guild-American Federation of Television and Radio Artists (SAG-AFTRA) strikes in 2023. However, the Stealing Isnt Innovation campaign isnt against AI, it just wants creatives to be part of the process. A better way existsthrough licensing deals and partnerships, some AI companies have taken the responsible, ethical route to obtaining the content and materials they wish to use, the letter reads. It is possible to have it all. We can have advanced, rapidly developing AI and ensure creators’ rights are respected. The Stealing Isnt Innovation campaign will promote itself through ads on social media and in news publications. Creatives in the U.K. have taken comparable action The latest campaign focuses on American creators and takes a bit of a nationalist stance in its opening line: Americas creative community is the envy of the world and creates jobs, economic growth, and exports. But artists across the U.K. have launched similar movements in response to AIs access to copyrighted material, including a law that would require creatives to opt out of letting AI use their work. In February 2025, the Make It Fair campaign ran in hundreds of publications to raise awareness of the threat of AI to creative industries. The same month saw over 1,000 musicians, from Kate Bush to The Clash, release a silent album titled Is This What We Want?with the 12 tracks spelling out: The British government must not legalise music theft to benefit AI companies. In May, creatives across industries took action again. In an open letter to Prime Minister Keir Starmer, everyone from Elton John to Kazuo Ishiguro voiced their opposition to the proposed copyright law. The U.K. government is set to issue policy proposals on the matter in mid-March.
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Anxiety about costs and affordability is particularly high among Asian Americans, Pacific Islanders and Native Hawaiians, even at a moment when economic stress is widespread, according to a new poll.About half of Asian American and Pacific Islander adults said they wanted the government to prioritize addressing the high cost of living and inflation, according to the survey from AAPI Data and The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research, which was conducted in early December. In comparison, a December AP-NORC poll found that about one-third of U.S. adults overall rated inflation and financial worries as the most pressing problems.The findings indicate that this small but fast-growing group is not persuaded by President Donald Trump’s attempts to tamp down worries about inflation and defend his tariffs. Even when considering partisanship, AAPI Democrats and Independents and even AAPI Republicans are at least slightly more likely than those groups overall to mention inflation and costs. Concern about costs has risen among AAPI adults since last year, when about 4 in 10 AAPI adults said they wanted the government to focus on this issue.Like Americans overall, AAPI adults have also become more focused on health care issues over the past year.The poll is part of an ongoing project exploring the views of Asian Americans, Native Hawaiians and Pacific Islanders, whose views are usually not highlighted in other surveys because of small sample sizes and lack of linguistic representation.Jayakumar Natarajan, a 56-year-old manager for a major tech company living in the San Francisco Bay Area, is rethinking his goal of retiring at 60 because of climbing costs in basic goods and health care. He can afford to live the way he wants for now, but is considering delaying retirement or moving outside the U.S., where prices are lower.The cost of health care is very much on his mind. “I think it will really make a big difference in the way I think about retirement planning,” he said. AAPI adults are worried about rising costs Inflation and affordability loom large for AAPI adults, even compared to other economic concerns, the survey found. About 2 in 10 AAPI adults mentioned housing costs or jobs and unemployment as priorities for the government to work on in the coming year, which was generally in line with Americans overall.Balancing financial obligations has become especially challenging for people living in high-cost areas, where a steady salary may not cover a growing family. Kevin Tu, 32, and his wife recently reached two milestones buying a new home outside of Seattle in Lynnwood, Washington, and expecting their first child. The couple works full time and Tu also has a math tutoring business, but he is still nervous about what will happen after the baby arrives.“I’m trying to figure out how to balance possible part-time day care with our mortgage, with cost of living,” said Tu, who is Taiwanese American.Black, Hispanic and AAPI adults were more apt than white adults to bring up unemployment, jobs and housing costs as priorities, the surveys found.Part of what may explain AAPI adults’ increasing worry about everyday costs is the largest AAPI adult populations reside in states and major metropolitan cities with higher costs of living and higher rent, such as California and New York.While tariffs have impacted American consumers across the board, they have a particularly strong effect on Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders who prefer certain imported goods such as food and clothing. Karthick Ramakrishnan, AAPI Data executive director and researcher at the University of California, Berkeley, recalls how last year, some AAPI shoppers were going to ethnic grocery stores and “stockpiling” ahead of tariffs kicking in.“When it comes to costs for Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders, it’s just not cost of general market groceries but ethnic market groceries,” Ramakrishnan said. “It’s something visible to them and potentially causing anxiety and worry.” Health care is also a priority for AAPI adults Some 44% of AAPI adult also want the government to prioritize health care in the coming year. That’s not meaningfully different from among U.S. adults overall, emphasizing Americans’ renewed focus on the issue after a year of health care cuts.Srilasya Volam, a 25-year-old business consultant in Atlanta said that some of her family members have embarked on ” medical tourism ” trips as a result of high U.S. health care costs, a practice of traveling to other countries for more cost-effective medical procedures.“It’s cheaper for us to get a flight ticket and go to India and have a medical procedure and come back than it is to have that done here,” she said. “When I was younger, we would just go to India and we’d be like, now that we’re here, let’s do everything: the dental checkups, every checkup. It’s a lot more cost effective.”The poll found that about 6 in 10 AAPI adults are “extremely” or “very” concerned about their health care costs increasing in 2026, which is roughly in line with U.S. adults overall. Falling confidence in the government’s ability to make progress The survey found that AAPI adults are less confident in the government’s ability to make progress on the important issues facing the country than they were just after the 2024 election.About 7 in 10 AAPI adults say they are “not at all” or just “slightly confident” that the government will make progress on key issues, up from 60% at the end of 2024.Dissatisfaction with the Trump administration may be a factor. And while the economy is top of mind, other factors could be feeding the fear that the government won’t change things for the better this year.Ernie Roaza, a 66-year-old retired geologist in Tallahassee, Florida, is a first generation immigrant to the U.S. from South Korea, where he grew up under a dictatorship. He worries that Trump is doing “everything that dictators do,” adding, “I’ve seen it before. It’s almost laughable, but it’s scary at the same time.”He remains optimistic that the country will get through it.“This administration will make things worse,” Roaza said. “But in every administration we’ve had, there are hills and valleys. We’re in the valleys right now.” The poll of 1,029 U.S. adults who are Asian American, Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islanders was conducted from Dec. 2-8, 2025, using a sample drawn from NORC’s probability-based Amplify AAPI Panel, designed to be representative of the Asian American, Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islander population. The margin of sampling error for all respondents is plus or minus 4.7 percentage points. Terry Tang and Linley Sanders, Associated Press
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