FBI arrests have exploded by 197 percent in 2025 compared to last year, as the Trump administration’s aggressive law enforcement strategy appears to be driving violent crime to historic lows across the nation, according to The Federalist.
The surge in arrests comes alongside stunning declines in violent crime. The murder rate last year fell to the lowest ever recorded, and violent crime overall has dropped to levels not seen in decades. Yet some conservative voices, including Steve Bannon, have urged Americans to dismiss the numbers entirely.
“Nobody believes” FBI crime data, Bannon recently declared, adding, “I don’t want to hear any more statistics about how crime’s coming down.”
That skepticism, while understandable given past government failures, may be missing the bigger picture.
The FBI has stumbled before, particularly with its active shooter reports and hate crime data. Some police departments have failed to submit complete information to the agency’s Uniform Crime Reports. But those past problems don’t mean the current numbers are being manipulated or that the dramatic drops in crime are fiction.
America tracks violent crime through two systems. The FBI measures crimes reported to police. The Bureau of Justice Statistics’ National Crime Victimization Survey estimates both reported and unreported crime. Researchers have long known that victims report only about 40 percent of violent crimes and roughly 30 percent of property crimes.
During the Biden administration, those two measures told very different stories. While reported violent crime fell by about 8 percent, total felony violent crime measured by the NCVS surged 59 percent. That’s the largest four-year percentage increase since the survey began more than five decades ago.
Why the gap? When victims lose faith that police will catch and punish offenders, they stop bothering to report crimes. Cities slashed police budgets, officers retired in droves, and “defund the police” policies gutted morale. Arrest rates collapsed. Victims saw no point in calling it in.
Some departments made reporting even harder. In certain jurisdictions, 911 operators would ask whether the offender was still present. If not, victims were told to visit a police station later to file a report. That extra burden meant many crimes simply went unrecorded.
Those policies have largely been reversed.
Beyond the arrest surge, voters have thrown out soft-on-crime prosecutors in major cities. Los Angeles and San Francisco replaced George Soros-backed district attorneys with officials willing to prosecute criminals aggressively and seek tougher sentences. President Trump’s U.S. attorneys have taken a similarly hard line.
The contrast with the Biden years is stark. In Washington, D.C., the previous administration’s U.S. Attorney declined to prosecute 67 percent of those arrested.
