Day: July 9, 2026

The murder rate in 2025 was the lowest in modern American history.

Preliminary data shows the murder rate fell nearly 20% from 2024, likely making it the lowest rate since reliable national data began to be collected in 1960.

Why was the murder rate so low?

I’m a professor of sociology and criminology who studies crime trends. In my book, “Crime Wave,” I explore how homicide rates have closely followed three trends over the past decade: alcohol consumption, drug abuse and firearm purchases. Now that the drug and alcohol crises are waning and gun purchases are falling, so too is the murder rate.

The 2015-2021 murder increase

The murder rate’s previous low came in 2014, capping a decline that had been more or less continuous since the early 1990s.

The murder rate usually rises and falls alongside other crimes, so through the 2010s, with property crime and overall youth offending dropping, criminologists expected the murder trend to follow suit.

Instead, the national murder rate increased sharply in 2015 and 2016, and then by an even larger margin in 2020.

Suddenly, it appeared that violent crime was spiraling out of control. By 2021, the homicide rate hit its highest level since the mid-1990s.

Popular, but incomplete, explanations

Some researchers and commentators attributed the homicide spikes to a so-called “Ferguson effect” in 2015 and, likewise, a “Minneapolis effect” in 2020. These theories are based on the idea that law enforcement officers were reluctant to be proactive or make arrests after nationwide protests against police brutality related to the police killings of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, in 2014 and George Floyd in Minneapolis in 2020. The evidence for these claims is mixed.

There is little consistent indication that a decline in proactive policing contributed to a crime increase in 2015, although the homicide spike in 2020 was likely exacerbated by a police “pullback”.

Still, the majority of the homicide spike took place before June 2020, when protests over Floyd’s death spread nationwide. A study published in the journal Epidemiology found that the increase began as early as October 2019, suggesting de-policing in the summer of 2020 likely worsened the rise rather than caused it.

De-policing is, at best, an incomplete explanation.

Substance abuse, guns and the ‘homicide epidemic’

As I document in “Crime Wave,” the crisis in violence was related to another crisis: deaths of despair, which include drug overdoses, suicides and alcohol-related fatalities.

In the years leading up to the 2015 homicide spike, the prescription opioid crisis gave way to the illicit opioid crisis. As opioid use shifted toward heroin and fentanyl, it became deadlier. People were more likely to overdose, and the drug market moved from pharmacists into the hands of street dealers. It wasn’t just the pharmacological effect of drugs but the systemic nature of drug markets – disputes between dealers, buyers and users – that contributed to the spike in homicides.

At the same time, alcohol consumption began to accelerate. Alcohol is connected to homicide rates in part because it decreases inhibition, nullifying social and personal constraints. A high percentage of both homicide offenders and victims are under the influence of alcohol during a fatal assault.

Finally, amid growing distrust of the police and the government, firearm sales began to increase during 2015 and 2016, setting an all-time record in 2020. Given that assaults with a firearm are more likely to lead to the death of the victim than assaults using other weapons, confrontations became deadlier.

In my assessment, the homicide rate moved in near lockstep with trends in drug overdoses, alcohol consumption and firearm purchases, each of which increased by its largest margin in 2020.

The COVID-19 pandemic likely exacerbated the substance abuse crisis, and the gun-buying spree was especially pronounced at three points: in March 2020, when the U.S. declared a national emergency over COVID-19; in June 2020, following the Floyd protests; and in the months surrounding the 2020 presidential election.

With more people under the influence of alcohol, an expanding illicit drug market and more guns available, the murder rate dramatically increased.

The murder rate decline after 2021

After peaking in 2021, the murder rate began to fall. This occurred slowly at first in 2022, but the estimated declines in 2023, 2024 and 2025 have been substantial. The reversal in the homicide trend has followed a similar timeline as the substance abuse and firearm purchasing patterns, though some indicators of firearm possession, such as their use in suicides, remain elevated.

When the homicide rate was rising, it defied criminologists’ expectations, breaking away from the property crime decline of the 2010s. Now, the murder rate is falling back in line with other crime trends, many of which are also among the lowest ever recorded. As the substance abuse crises continue to wane, I expect murder rates to fall even further in the near future.

Additionally, with youth criminal involvement hitting historic lows, the next generation appears to be one of the least criminally prone in decades, which bodes well for continued reductions in the murder rate.

James Tuttle does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

​Politics + Society – The Conversation

In the annals of Supreme Court decisions, the public likely remembers what justices wrote for the court in famous cases, such as the Brown v. Board of Education ruling that outlawed racial segregation in public schools.

Or perhaps the public remembers great dissenting opinions that display foresight and speak across the ages. Justice John Marshall Harlan’s dissent in the 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson case, which legalized racial segregation, is a shining example.

But Supreme Court scholars and the public alike seldom pay much attention to concurring opinions, in which a justice expounds on the views of their colleagues in the majority. Some legal experts have denigrated concurring opinions as “the worst form of legal clutter… that are, usually, better left unwritten.”

On June 30, 2026, in the Trump v. Barbara ruling, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson showed how wrong that view can be when she delivered a monumental concurring opinion in the birthright citizenship case.

Chief Justice John Roberts wrote the majority opinion, ruling that the 14th Amendment guarantees automatic citizenship to virtually everyone born on U.S. soil. The decision invalidated President Donald Trump’s executive order that sought to deny citizenship to children born to foreign parents who are unlawfully in the United States.

Jackson, however, used her concurrence to go far beyond that and offer a new understanding of the origins of the 14th Amendment’s guarantee of birthright citizenship and its promise of equal treatment. She did so while emphasizing the singular contributions of Black Americans to that endeavor.

Along the way, Jackson criticized Justice Clarence Thomas and the court’s dominant originalist jurisprudence – centered on interpreting the Constitution based on how it was understood when it was adopted – for distorting the historical record. Jackson has previously signaled that a responsible use of history requires examining all relevant sources instead of cherry-picking among them to make a particular point.

As a politics scholar who has written about history and law, I believe that years from now, when Americans look back on Trump v. Barbara, it will be Jackson, not Roberts, whom they remember.

No shrinking violet

During her brief tenure on the court, Jackson has shown herself to be no shrinking violet. From the start, she has made her voice heard during oral arguments and in her written opinions.

As political scientists Jake Truscott and Adam Feldman wrote in December 2022, after her first three months as a justice, Jackson “was by far the most active participant in oral arguments.”

Since then, nothing has changed about Jackson’s style on the bench. The Washington Examiner reports that she “took up more than 20% of the Supreme Court’s questioning last term.”

Jackson also is not shy about writing dissenting opinions, and the occasional concurrence, whether in combination with others or alone. In both her dissents and concurrences, Thomas, the court’s only other Black member and its leading proponent of originalism, has been one of her main targets.

For example, in her 2023 dissent from the court’s decision to end affirmative action in higher education, Jackson directly criticized Thomas when she wrote that “those who demand that no one think about race … refuse to see, much less solve for, the elephant in the room – the race-linked disparities that continue to impede achievement of our great Nation’s full potential.”

Originalism, Jackson-style

Jackson has also called herself an originalist. However, she departs from Thomas’ brand of originalism.

For Jackson, to understand how any provision of the Constitution was understood requires unearthing sources of constitutional meaning that have been largely ignored by others on the court.

That vision was on display in her concurring opinion in the birthright citizenship case. There, Jackson paid particular attention to what Black Americans did in inspiring and crafting the 14th Amendment.

This contrasts with the traditional originalist story that highlights white protagonists such as Pennsylvania Rep. Thaddeus Stevens, who introduced the proposal to add the 14th Amendment to the Constitution, or President Andrew Johnson, who resisted the 14h Amendment on the grounds that it infringed on states’ rights.

Justice Thomas embraced this sort of vision in Trump v. Barbara. As he tells it, the birth of the 14th Amendment can be traced to the concerns of members of the Reconstruction Congress that the 1866 Civil Rights Act, which extended certain fundamental rights to “all persons born in the United States,” would be repealed or overturned in the courts.

Black people have little or no role in Thomas’ account.

Black Americans and birthright citizenship

Jackson’s opinion registers her impatience with such an exclusion. She faults Thomas for his “narrow vision of the Fourteenth Amendment (that) bears little relationship to the history of its ratification.”

Instead, Jackson traces the 14th Amendment to work done by people “within and beyond Congress.”

Jackson follows Harvard historian Jill Lepore’s suggestion that originalist judges should always attend to “all the people who are basically knocking on the windows and banging on the doors with their ideas about what should be in the Constitution.”

As Jackson recounts, “In the decades leading up to the ratification of the 14th amendment, black Americans organized and gathered at more than 600 local and national conventions across the country. There, delegates erected the political and intellectual scaffolding of the 14th amendment and, later, for the black civil rights movement more generally.”

Contrary to Thomas, who argues that birthright citizenship applies only to former slaves and their offspring, Jackson notes that Blacks “helped galvanize the push for full equality.” When ratified, Jackson explains, “the citizenship clause thus vindicated the universalist vision of the delegates at the colored conventions and their allies in Congress.”

And in a pointed dig at her colleague, Jackson writes that the “distortion of historical facts – retellings that reimagine and repurpose past events to lend credence to misbegotten aims” – poses a grave threat to the constitutional project and America’s well-being.

Extending the work of the 1619 Project

Jackson’s concurrence in the birthright case builds on the approach to history taken by the so-called 1619 Project. That project, unveiled by The New York Times in 2019, “aimed to reframe the country’s history by placing the consequences of slavery and the contributions of black Americans at the very center of our national narrative.”

Nikole Hannah-Jones, creator of the 1619 Project, insists “the United States simply would not exist without us. The idealistic, strenuous, and patriotic efforts of black Americans have helped the country live up to its founding ideals.”

Jackson fully embraces that story and, in her concurring opinion in Trump v. Barbara, extends it to include what happened in 1866 when the U.S. restated and renewed its founding commitment to equality. She suggests that the 14th Amendment would not have come into being without similar “patriotic efforts” by Black Americans.

What makes Jackson’s concurrence extraordinary, Slate’s Robyn Nicole Sanders writes, “is that it insists on telling the 14th amendment story honestly … (and) it is at moments elegiac in its remembrance of the people whose suffering and resistance gave birth to the citizenship clause.”

That is why I believe Jackson’s concurrence will be remembered as one of the great opinions produced by a Supreme Court justice.

Austin Sarat does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

​Politics + Society – The Conversation

When Colorado replaced its landmark AI law in May 2026, the move looked like a retreat from ambitious lawmaking. The state abandoned a first-of-its-kind framework that required companies to actively prevent algorithmic discrimination. That’s the risk that automated systems produce biased outcomes based on race, gender, age or other protected characteristics when making decisions about people’s jobs, loans or healthcare.

In its place, on May 14, 2026, the legislature passed something far narrower, including a set of transparency requirements telling companies what they must disclose to consumers.

I study how AI and technology are reshaping policymaking and democratic accountability. I also track state AI legislation through the U.S. State AI Policy Tracker at the University of Denver’s Daniels College of Business.

Colorado’s back-and-forth on AI legislation exposes a fundamental shift in how state leaders are thinking about governing AI. It also raises an unresolved constitutional question that could determine whether any state AI law survives federal challenge.

From prevention to disclosure

The original Colorado law, called the Colorado Artificial Intelligence Act, asked companies to prevent harm. The replacement asks companies to inform consumers. That distinction may sound technical, but it reflects a meaningful change in governing philosophy.

The Colorado Artificial Intelligence Act was built on direct obligations. Developers and deployers of high-risk AI systems – such as tools used to screen job applicants, evaluate loan applications or determine insurance eligibility – had to establish risk management programs. The law also required companies to conduct impact assessments and take proactive steps to avoid discriminatory outcomes. In essence, the state was telling companies: Govern yourselves, and prove you’re doing it.

The replacement law, called the Automated Decision-Making Technology Act, takes a different approach.

Companies must notify consumers when automated technology plays a role in a consequential decision. That could include a hiring determination or a loan denial. If that decision goes against a consumer, the company has 30 days to explain how the technology contributed to the outcome.

Consumers can also request corrections to inaccurate personal data and ask for meaningful human review. The duty of care, risk management mandates and impact assessments from the first iteration of the law are gone.

For Coloradans, the practical difference is significant. Under the old law, a company using AI to deny a loan application, for example, would need internal processes designed to catch discriminatory patterns before they reached the consumer.

Under the new law, that company must tell the consumer that AI was involved and explain its role after the fact. However, the company has no obligation to audit the system that produced the decision. The burden shifts from the institution deploying the technology to the individual affected by it.

Equal protection out, free speech in

A federal lawsuit filed in April 2026 brought the timeline for this legislative overhaul forward quickly. Elon Musk’s company xAI sued to block enforcement of the Colorado Artificial Intelligence Act, the original law.

Days later, the DOJ intervened in support of xAI. It was the first time the federal government had moved to invalidate a state AI law.

In its legal filing, the DOJ made two constitutional arguments against the original Colorado law. The new law neutralized the first argument but may have sharpened the second.

The first was an equal protection argument. The DOJ argued that the law’s antidiscrimination framework effectively forced developers to make race- and sex-conscious decisions about how their models behave. For example, companies would have been required to test whether their AI systems produced different outcomes for different demographic groups and to adjust them if they did.

That kind of government-imposed classification is one courts subject to heightened scrutiny, meaning the government bears a heavy burden to justify it.

The new law eliminated this argument entirely. The algorithmic discrimination provisions are gone, and there is nothing left in the statute that requires developers to monitor or adjust their outputs for discriminatory patterns.

The second argument made by the DOJ was a First Amendment argument, specifically what is called compelled speech. The idea is straightforward: The First Amendment does not just protect a person’s right to speak, it also protects the right not to speak. When a government requires a private company to deliver specific messages to consumers, that mandate has to meet a constitutional standard. Courts ask whether the government has a strong enough reason to force someone to say something they otherwise would not.

xAI characterized the Colorado law’s disclosure and reporting requirements as exactly this kind of forced communication.

In my opinion, this argument was strengthened, not weakened, by the rewrite. The new Automated Decision-Making Technology Act kept little besides notice and disclosure duties, so the new law is, at its core, the government telling companies what they have to say to consumers.

In narrowing the statute this way, the state legislature may have made the compelled speech argument easier to isolate and litigate, even as it made the equal protection argument disappear.

The executive order behind the lawsuit

The DOJ’s decision to intervene in a state-level lawsuit did not come out of nowhere. It followed directly from Executive Order 14365, which President Donald Trump signed in December 2025.

The order declared that a “minimally burdensome national policy framework” should govern AI, and it directed the DOJ to challenge state laws that conflict with that vision. The order also instructed the Commerce Department to publish an evaluation of existing state AI laws, identifying those it deems “onerous.” It included a specific mandate to flag laws compelling disclosures that could violate the First Amendment.

That evaluation was due by March 2026, but it has not yet appeared. If that list materializes – and if Colorado’s new law lands on it – it will signal that the administration sees this state not as a single problem to resolve but as a test case for a broader federal campaign against state AI regulation.

Dozens of states have introduced AI-related legislation in 2026 that touches on the same areas Colorado tried to regulate, including employment, lending, housing and healthcare.

What Coloradans should expect

For now, not much changes in Colorado. A federal judge stayed enforcement of the original law in April 2026, and that stay applies to the replacement law as well. This means none of its provisions can be enforced yet.

The stay will remain in place until at least 14 days after the court rules on xAI’s request for a preliminary injunction, which is a court order that would block the law from taking effect while the case is decided. That request will not be filed until 28 days after the state completes its rulemaking process. So the timeline depends on the attorney general, the courts and the DOJ’s willingness to press a challenge against a law that already conceded substantial ground.

Read more of our stories about Colorado.

Stefani Langehennig receives funding from the American Political Science Association’s (APSA) Centennial Center Research Center..

​Politics + Society – The Conversation