According to a new national poll, approximately half of Americans now say crime is an “extremely” or “very” serious problem. This marks the second straight year national concern has declined.
That shift reflects a real sense of progress: Violent crime rates have fallen in most cities since their pandemic-era highs, and headlines about crime spikes have grown rarer. But beneath those trends lies a quieter transformation. Crime itself is changing, and so are the people involved.
For decades, criminologists described the “age-crime curve,” the consistent pattern showing that offenders commit the greatest number of crimes in their late teens or early twenties before declining with maturity. Yet recent arrest data show that curve has shifted rightward. Arrests for aggravated assault, burglary and larceny-theft now cluster around age 32 — roughly a decade older than the classic model predicted. Even for violent offenses like robbery, rape and murder, the median arrest age has increased by several years compared with 2000.
The same pattern appears among victims. National homicide and mortality statistics show that the average age of murder victims rose from about 34 in 2020 to 36 in 2024. Analysts note that the share of victims aged 40 and older continues to grow, while victims under 25 represent a shrinking portion of all homicides.
In other words, America’s violence problem hasn’t completely disappeared — but it has aged along with the rest of the country.
Some of this shift stems from simple demography. The United States is older overall, and changes in population age structure naturally affect exposure to both offending and victimization. But cultural and behavioral dynamics are also at work. Younger cohorts appear less involved in traditional street crime, likely due to improved early-intervention systems, social media-based lifestyles and evolving social norms. At the same time, adult-stage risk factors, such as substance abuse, intimate-partner conflict, economic stress, and untreated mental illness, now explain a growing share of serious crime.
The problem is that America’s public-safety framework hasn’t kept up. Federal and state grant programs largely revolve around youth-violence prevention, after-school programs and juvenile diversion. While youth violence remains a serious and preventable public safety issue, it cannot be the sole focus of prevention policy when adult-stage violence now accounts for much of the criminality. The data show that both offenders and victims are increasingly adults, well beyond their 20s.
Recognizing that shift doesn’t mean expanding bureaucracy — it means focusing on where interventions will matter most. Recent efforts to “get tough” by passing harsher juvenile sentencing laws, however well-intentioned, are unlikely to make communities safer, since most current violence stems from adult offenders and evidence shows that deterrence depends on certainty of apprehension, not the severity of punishment. Federal and state prevention grants should explicitly include adults at high risk of violence, specifically those struggling with addiction, unstable housing or family conflict, since targeted behavioral-health programs have been shown to reduce repeat offending among this group.
Police strategy should likewise reflect the reality that most serious cases now stem from domestic disputes, substance use, or interpersonal violence and not simply youth gangs. Training should emphasize communication, documentation and coordination with social-service partners, ensuring that officers have the tools to address the problems they encounter most frequently. Strengthening investigative capacity, improving clearance rates and ensuring consistent consequences through incarceration, mandated treatment or supervision would reinforce the predictability that actually deters crime.
Ultimately, prevention and enforcement must work together: Adult treatment courts, reentry programs and probation services reduce recidivism most effectively when accountability is paired with behavioral-health and employment support, helping reduce recidivism and stabilize communities.
A decline in fear is good news, but complacency is not. America’s crime problem today looks less like teenage gangs and more like midlife disputes among adults under stress. If nearly half the country still sees crime as a serious issue, they aren’t wrong — they’re responding to a problem that has evolved faster than policy has.
Crime hasn’t gone away; it has simply grown older. Until public-safety strategies reflect this, the sense of security showing up in opinion polls will remain a step ahead of the reality on the ground.
Jillian Snider is a resident senior fellow at the R Street Institute, adjunct lecturer at John Jay College of Criminal Justice and a retired NYPD officer.
