FBI Director Kash Patel thanked President Donald Trump on Saturday “for backing the blue and letting good cops be cops,” hours after the White House posted a graphic claiming the “largest drop in violent crime ever recorded.”
“Thank you President Trump for backing the blue and letting good cops be cops 🇺🇸,” Patel wrote in a post on X on Saturday afternoon. He was quoting a White House post on X, published about five hours earlier, that read “MAKING AMERICA SAFE AGAIN!” above a black-and-white photo of Trump captioned “LARGEST DROP IN VIOLENT CRIME EVER RECORDED.”
Patel posted while attending the International Association of Chiefs of Police conference in Orlando, Florida. In a post from the conference late Friday, he cited a “20% reduction in the national murder rate; the largest single year decrease in violent crime since 1936; 54,000+ violent crime arrests for this @FBI, up 90%.” He added: “Backing the Blue is here to stay. If you touch a cop, this FBI will put you down.”
In a video posted Saturday, Patel wrote that “this FBI is achieving historic results delivering the largest reduction in violent crime in us history” and thanked Trump “for backing the men and women of this FBI.”
The White House claim tracks the FBI’s own annual data. In an Aug. 14 release, the bureau said reported violent crime fell an estimated 9.3% from 2024 to 2025, “the largest year-to-year decline in violent crime rates since FBI estimations began in 1936.” Murder and nonnegligent manslaughter fell an estimated 18.1%, and the 2025 murder rate of 4.1 per 100,000 people tied 1955 and 1956 for the lowest on record, the FBI said. The White House promoted the figures in an Aug. 18 release titled “President Trump Delivers the Largest Drop in Violent Crime in American History.”
The decline began before Trump returned to office. The FBI’s 2024 crime statistics showed violent crime falling an estimated 4.5% from 2023 to 2024, with murder down 14.9%, during President Joe Biden’s final full year in office. The Council on Criminal Justice, a nonpartisan research group, said in its mid-year 2026 update that the drop “began in the second half of 2022” and has continued, with homicide rates 18% lower in the first half of 2026 than a year earlier across the 30 study cities that reported that crime.
The FBI figures cover only crimes reported to law enforcement agencies that submit data to the bureau’s voluntary Uniform Crime Reporting program, which the FBI said covered 96.2% of the population in 2025.
Patel’s post did not specify what Trump had done to let police “be cops.” Patel did not cite a source for the 20% murder-rate figure in his conference post; the FBI’s Aug. 14 release reported an estimated 18.1% decline in murder offenses for 2025 and did not give a percentage change in the murder rate.
The reduction in violent crime in 2025 is documented in FBI data, and the bureau describes it as the largest annual decline since its estimates began. The attribution of that decline to Trump, and Patel’s description of Trump as “backing the blue,” are the administration’s characterizations; the FBI’s own figures show the drop began before Trump’s second term, and the Council on Criminal Justice dates it to 2022. No response to Patel’s post from Democratic leaders was found as of Sunday.