When homicides in the city of Knoxville fell 26% in 2025, officials were quick to credit proactive policing and a slate of local initiatives, such as the city’s Tender Love and Care Zones, a community engagement program that, among other things, hosts events featuring free food and activities in high crime areas. Knoxville also hired an outside group to deploy so-called “violence interrupters.”

The decline in homicides is fantastic news; I just wouldn’t be so quick to ascribe a simple cause to the drop.

Homicides declined almost everywhere in the U.S. in 2025, including in cities that did not roll out new community festivals or contract with out-of-state organizations for mercenary violence interrupters. Nationwide, murders fell by roughly 20%, making it the largest single-year decline on record. Southern cities generally did even better than that.

Chattanooga, for example, saw homicides decline by 48% in 2025, nearly double Knoxville’s percentage drop. Other cities with very different policing models and community programs, such as Des Moines and Salt Lake City, also experienced meaningful declines. Either dozens of cities simultaneously cracked the code on homicide reduction, or we are watching a national cycle play out—not a collection of local miracles.

Homicide rates surged across the country in the early 2020s. At the time, Knoxville officials didn’t blame poor local decisions for the increase. And rightly so, because Knoxville was simply part of the national trend.

Last year looks like the mirror image of the 2020 spike. Murders went up almost everywhere and now they are coming down almost everywhere. This is what statisticians call reversion to the mean—and what politicians often rebrand as “our programs are working.”

And Knoxville had some room to revert. Its homicide rate in 2024 was well above the national average, so a larger-than-average decline in 2025 would not have been surprising even if the city had spent the year doing nothing new.

Another wrinkle: while homicides fell in 2025, a jump in assaults resulted in an 11% increase in Knoxville’s overall violent crimes. If the city’s initiatives were uniquely effective, you might expect improvement consistently across categories.

None of this is to say that Knoxville’s initiatives had zero effect. Maybe they helped at the margin. Maybe they mattered a lot. All we really know is that murders fell in Knoxville during a year when murders fell basically everywhere. Which is great. Fewer murders are a good thing, even if no one locally deserves a trophy.

But what benefit are we actually buying with each new community-engagement program or violence-interruption contract? If murder declines are largely driven by forces outside of the city’s control, then attributing the improvement to local policy risks confusing luck with skill.

While it is mostly harmless for politicians to take credit for good outcomes on their watch, it can become a problem if the victory lap turns into a permanent budget item.

David Moon is president of Moon Capital Management. A version of this piece originally appeared in the USA TODAY NETWORK.