Crime Policy After the Pandemic: What Changed, What Worked, and What Didn’t

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Over the past several years, national crime indicators have trended downward from the pandemic-era spike. Homicides have fallen substantially in many cities, auto theft has declined after hitting historic highs, and several other categories of violent crime are easing. But these numbers raise an important question: which recent legal changes actually helped, and which ones didn’t move the needle?

Instead of speculation, this analysis focuses strictly on crime policies, federal laws, and Supreme Court decisions that produced observable effects, either positive, negative, or neutral. Reforms with no current measurable outcomes have not been included. The goal is simple: identify what has worked, what has not, and where the evidence is clear rather than theoretical.

Ghost-gun regulation

One of the clearest recent examples of a federal legal change with measurable, real-world effects is the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives (ATF)’s ghost-gun rule. This rule, adopted in 2022, requires serial numbers and background checks for unfinished frames and receivers that are sold as “build-your-own” firearm kits. For many years before the rule, a substantial number of ghost guns were recovered in criminal investigations. In California, for example, more than 18% of all guns used in crimes and later recovered were ghost guns. However, after the implementation of the ghost-gun rule, multiple departments in California reported that ghost-gun recoveries either declined or flattened. Recoveries of ghost guns dropped 23% in California, 8% in New York and Philadelphia, and 25% in Baltimore. The Supreme Court upheld the 2022 ATF gun rule in March 2025, ensuring serialization and background checks remain a national requirement. The combination of measurable declines and a definitive legal ruling makes this one of the very few federal gun regulations with visible, documented success.

Bipartisan Safer Communities Act

The Bipartisan Safer Communities Act (BSCA) has proven not to be just symbolic. Federal prosecutors have brought more than 500 cases under its new trafficking and straw-purchasing (illegally buying a gun for someone who cannot) provisions, and improved under-21 background checks have blocked transfers that would have previously gone under the radar. These concrete, measurable enforcement results show that the BSCA closed genuine gaps in federal gun law that had made some trafficking behavior difficult to charge. However, enforcement outputs are not the same as violence-reduction outcomes. 

The current data do not yet show that these prosecutions reduced shootings, limited the broader supply of crime guns, or prevented young buyers from obtaining firearms through other means. Crime has fallen nationally since 2022, but multiple factors, including ghost-gun regulation, targeted policing, auto-theft interventions, and pandemic normalization, could also explain the decline. The fairest conclusion is that the Act strengthened federal capacity to disrupt illegal gun purchasing and trafficking in ways that are trackable rather than theoretical, but its ultimate impact on violence is currently unproven. In other words, the BSCA is best described as an actively used, potentially promising enforcement tool, but lacking enough outcome data yet to claim that it caused measurable reductions in gun crime.

Recent SCOTUS Decisions

Supreme Court decisions have also shaped the crime landscape in measurable ways. In United States v. Rahimi (2024), the Court upheld 18 U.S.C. § 922(g)(8), which prohibits gun possession by individuals under domestic-violence restraining orders. This major decision preserves a legal tool that has been consistently linked to lower rates of intimate-partner homicide. In a review of six studies deemed the most methodologically sound by a report by the RAND Corporation, the data have repeatedly shown that firearm-prohibition laws for domestic abusers correspond to significant reductions in domestic-violence killings, meaning Rahimi protected a policy with clear, life-saving impact. In addition to Rahimi, the Supreme Court’s 2025 decision to uphold the ATF ghost-gun rule solidified another reform that was already showing measurable reductions in the use of untraceable firearms. Both outcomes matter not because they create new laws, but because they preserve policies with documented effects on violence and gun supply.

Not every legal development has been positive. In 2022, the Court’s ruling in New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen struck down New York’s requirement that residents show “proper cause” to obtain a concealed-carry permit, forcing several states to loosen public-carry restrictions. A large body of empirical research, including RAND Corporation’s gun-policy analysis, finds “supportive evidence” that shall-issue concealed-carry laws are associated with increases in violent crime and firearm homicides. A review by The Trace found that 16 of 20 states that adopted permitless carry between 2015 and 2022 experienced increases in shooting deaths afterward. The Center for American Progress similarly reports that right-to-carry laws increase firearm homicides by approximately 13 percent and firearm violent crime by 29 percent. While crime is influenced by many factors, these studies suggest that loosening public-carry rules has measurable negative public-safety consequences, not benefits.

The Elimination of Cash-Bail in Illinois

Some reforms have produced neutral outcomes rather than increases or decreases in crime. Advocates of cash-bail abolition and opponents of those reforms both predicted dramatic consequences when Illinois eliminated cash bail in 2023 through the Pretrial Fairness Act. Early research published in the National Library of Medicine’s database found no increase in statewide crime attributable to the reform and a substantial reduction in the statewide jail population. Illinois’s experience suggests that cash-bail reform did not worsen public safety, contradicting many claims of impending spikes in crime, while also not appearing to drive the recent nationwide decline in crime. Neutral results matter because they demonstrate that certain justice-system changes can enhance fairness without compromising safety.

Vehicular Theft

Catalytic-converter theft surged during the pandemic, with insurance claims rising from about 16,660 in 2020 to 64,701 in 2022, prompting states to tighten rules on scrap-metal buyers. Multiple states, including Arizona and Connecticut, required scrap-metal dealers to verify identification and maintain detailed records, restrict immediate cash payments, or obtain specific licenses for catalytic-converter transactions. While falling precious-metal prices and law-enforcement crackdowns also played a role, insurance and crime-reporting data show thefts declined sharply afterward, with State Farm reporting a 74% drop in converter-theft claims in early 2024 compared with 2023, and NICB-linked estimates falling from roughly 95,000 thefts in 2022 to about 43,000 in 2023.

A similar pattern occurred with Hyundai and Kia thefts. Millions of older models lacked electronic immobilizers, leading to viral theft spikes and coordinated action by state attorneys general and lawsuits that forced the companies to roll out anti-theft software fixes. Analyses from the Highway Loss Data Institute found theft-claim rates for updated vehicles fell by more than half, and NICB data show U.S. auto thefts declined 16.6% in 2024, with analysts attributing much of the drop to these fixes. In both cases, legal and regulatory pressure triggered technical changes that produced measurable reductions in specific crime categories—an unusually clear causal chain in crime-policy outcomes.

Conclusion

If there is a lesson in the crime trends of the past several years, it is that policy works best when it targets real-world crime mechanisms. Regulations that cut off illegal gun supply chains, laws that keep firearms away from documented abusers, technical fixes that prevent easy auto theft, and prosecution tools aimed at traffickers are producing measurable effects. Conversely, loosening concealed-carry laws is associated with more violence, not less, and some reforms, like bail changes, appear to neither raise nor lower crime but may advance other goals. When public debates drift into ideology, the evidence offers a simpler standard: crime policy should be judged by what can be measured in the real world.

Connor Swenson is a junior concentrating in Political Science. He is a writer for the Brown Undergraduate Law Review and can be contacted at connor_swenson@brown.edu. 

Alice Kovarik is a sophomore at Brown University studying Economics and International and Public Affairs. She is an editor for the Brown Undergraduate Law Review and can be contacted at alice_kovarik@brown.edu.