America’s Safety Is Fragile; Trump Is Tearing Down the Systems That Protect It

America in 2025 is safer than it’s been in years. After a devastating surge during the early pandemic—when the U.S. homicide rate rose more than 30%—homicide rates have since plummeted. In 2024 alone, they dropped 16% nationally, one of the sharpest declines since the FBI began keeping national data.

This progress isn’t happenstance. It’s the direct result of deliberate investments in policy, research, and community-led strategies that addressed the underlying reasons for crime and violence. This progress is now under direct assault as the Trump administration has moved swiftly to dismantle the vital systems that keep Americans safe. In the last two weeks, the Justice Department canceled hundreds of critical grants to local governments and community organizations that fund violence prevention and public safety programs. Hundreds of National Science Foundation grants were terminated, including my own, following infiltration from Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency. If these rollbacks continue, we risk reversing years of progress and returning to a more violent, less stable future.

In Camden, New Jersey—where I teach at Rutgers University and serve as director of research at the New Jersey Gun Violence Research Center—the turnaround has been particularly dramatic. Just over a decade ago, Camden was written off as the “murder capital of the country.” In 2013, the small city of 75,000 people saw 57 homicides. In 2024, that number dropped to 17—a historic low. Today, fewer families are grieving, and fewer children are growing up in the shadow of violence. For a city long abandoned by political will and public imagination, this transformation offers a lesson in what’s possible when communities and institutions work together.

We must demand that our leaders defend our right to safety—not just from crime, but from neglect, disinvestment, and political sabotage.

The progress in Camden was not inevitable. It was built—piece by piece—through hard-won investments in community violence prevention and a complete overhaul of the city’s police force. And in recent years, we’ve seen similar progress unfold across the country in reducing violence—driven by a surge in federal investment and coordination.

In the wake of the pandemic, the Biden administration invested hundreds of millions of dollars into the kind of labor-intensive work that makes communities safer through the Community-Based Violence Intervention Initiative and provisions within the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act. Laws were passed to extend background checks, implement life-saving red flag laws, and crack down on gun traffickers. The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives regulated ghost guns and the kits used to assemble them, curbing the surge of untraceable firearms on our streets. The White House even established an Office of Gun Violence Prevention to lead these efforts. Federal funding allowed grassroots organizations to hire street outreach workers and get help to those affected by violence before more harm was done.

States and cities followed suit, creating their own offices of violence prevention and refocusing law enforcement efforts on the those at highest risk while improving community relations. For the first time in decades, a coherent, multi-sector approach to safety led by the federal government was beginning to take hold. It was working.

All of that is now under threat.

Since returning to office, President Donald Trump has moved swiftly to dismantle the vital systems that keep Americans safe. The administration’s attacks are wide-ranging but the bigger picture is what matters. These aren’t isolated cuts or rollbacks. Taken together, they amount to a deliberate dismantling of the very infrastructure that underpins public safety in this country.

On his first day in office, Trump shuttered the White House Office of Gun Violence Prevention. In recent weeks, the Department of Health and Human Services initiated massive layoffs, including nearly the entire Division of Violence Prevention at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Programs that tracked injuries and deaths—like the Web-Based Injury Statistics Query and Reporting System (WISQARS)—have gone dark. Researchers at universities across the country have had their federal funding frozen, stalled, or revoked, often with no official explanation. A group of House Republicans, led by Rep. Diana Harshbarger of Tennessee, has even called for a complete ban on federal research aimed at preventing gun violence—an attack not just on science, but on the very idea that violence is a problem we can solve.

The Department of Justice has also reversed course. A zero-tolerance policy for lawbreaking gun dealers, established under the Biden administration, has been eliminated. The result: Dealers who sell firearms without background checks or falsify records are now far less likely to lose their licenses. Attorney General Pam Bondi is reviewing lifesaving gun regulations, including a rule closing the gun show loophole and a ban on certain AR-style firearm attachments used in mass shootings. These policies were hard-fought and evidence-based. Now, they’re on the chopping block.

None of this is abstract. Research, policy, and funding are what make real-world safety possible. Without them, outreach workers and police officers can’t do their jobs. Emergency room partnerships break down. Communities lose tools to anticipate and prevent violence. Safety doesn’t just happen. It is produced through effort, coordination, and care. And when those systems collapse, people die.

Violence is not just a crime issue. It is a preventable threat to public health, even if the administration denies it. It spreads, it scars, and it sickens. It takes our children, hurts those who are most marginalized, and it divides us. The recent gains in safety are fragile—hard-earned, but easily reversed. If the systems that made that progress possible are dismantled, the violence will return. We can’t take this moment for granted, and we cannot afford to stand by while it’s undone.

We must demand that our leaders defend our right to safety—not just from crime, but from neglect, disinvestment, and political sabotage. The systems that protect our lives and our communities were built through years of tireless effort. They can’t be allowed to collapse overnight. The cost is too great. The consequences, unthinkable. It’s time to reclaim public safety as a public good, and to fight—loudly—for the systems that make peace possible.