Crime Just Fell at the Fastest Rate Since 1936. Why Are People Still Carrying Pepper Spray?

The FBI says violent crime fell at the fastest rate on record in 2025. The market for pepper spray, personal alarms, and stun guns keeps growing anyway.

In August, the FBI released its finalized crime figures for 2025, and they were historic: violent crime fell 9.3%, the largest single-year decline since the bureau began estimating national trends in 1936. Murder dropped 18.1% to a rate of 4.1 per 100,000, matching 1955 and 1956 for the lowest reading in the series. The FBI's own writeup said the 2025 decrease "stands apart in the Bureau's nearly 90-year history of national crime estimates."

Five days later, market research firm SNS Insider projected that global pepper spray sales will grow from $846 million in 2025 to $1.5 billion by 2035. A separate forecast puts the entire self-defense products category on track from $3.0 billion this year to $5.57 billion by 2036. And earlier this month in South Korea, one knife attack in the port city of Incheon sent self-defense purchases up 158% in two days, and a popular emergency whistle set sold out online.

Meanwhile, the person you are thinking of right now, your wife, your daughter, your neighbor who walks the dog at 6 a.m., is still slipping a canister into her jacket pocket before she goes out.

Crime statistics measure what happened to a country, while fear measures what could happen to a person. Over six decades, those two things have often refused to move together, and the gap between them explains almost everything about what Americans carry, when they buy it, and why a record-safe year can still be a booming one for personal safety.

The drop, as the FBI measured it

Start with what the data says, because the decline deserves to be taken seriously. The FBI's 2025 Crime in the United States report, compiled from more than 17,000 law enforcement agencies covering nearly 97% of the population, found every major category of violent crime down:

The decline has been building for years, and it reaches every kind of community. Violent crime fell sharply in 2023 and 2024 before the record 2025 drop, and Axios found the 2025 decline touching every population group, from the largest cities to rural counties; cities of 500,000 to 1 million residents saw violent crime fall 15.3% and murder fall 27.4%. Analyst Jeff Asher, who tracks crime data city by city, notes that early 2026 figures point to another steep drop, with murder down 17% in his sample of 590 agencies through June. His summary: 2025's murder rate was "lower last year than it has been in the lifetime of anyone born after Kennedy was elected president."

By any honest reading, the country got safer.

The fear that stayed

Every October, Gallup asks Americans whether there is an area within a mile of their home where they would be afraid to walk alone at night. It has asked that question since 1965, which makes it one of the longest-running measures of how safe people feel in their own neighborhoods. In October 2025, 31% said yes. That is down from 35% in 2024 and 40% in 2023, and only two points above the 29% trend low Gallup recorded in 2020. But nearly one in three adults still does not feel safe walking near home at night, and the Council on Criminal Justice estimates that about 90 million U.S. adults live with some level of fear of crime. That is in a year when the murder rate matched its lowest reading since 1955.

The averages hide the audience. Gallup's 2025 results break out who is carrying that fear, and the split is wide:

If you are a woman reading this, the 31% headline probably undersells your experience: 41% of women say they are afraid to walk alone at night near home, and so do 42% of city residents. Fear also concentrates by income, at 43% among households earning under $40,000, households that often have the fewest options to move somewhere safer or drive instead of walk. Gallup's 2023 panel survey found that 66% of adults had avoided at least one routine activity out of fear of crime.

So the first answer is that "crime fell" is a national average, and averages are not distributed evenly to the people doing the worrying.

Why fear and crime stopped moving together

But demographics are only half the explanation, because fear does not merely sit above the crime rate. Over sixty years, it has largely stopped tracking the crime rate at all. Plot Gallup's fear measure against the U.S. murder rate and the lines cross, diverge, and occasionally move in opposite directions:

The October 2020 point makes the separation between fear and crime clearest: murder was climbing, and Americans reported the least fear in six decades of polling, likely because so many people were home during a pandemic. Three years later murder was falling and fear had climbed back to 40%. Feelings respond to exposure and context, which the annual report does not provide.

A Council on Criminal Justice study published in August 2026, by researchers Ernesto Lopez and Amanda Graham, shows the same gap from another angle. It asked about worry rather than fear, and the answers are telling. 43% of adults said they worry at least somewhat about being murdered, and about 1 in 10 said they were very or extremely worried. Only 6% said they were likely or very likely to be drugged, murdered, sexually assaulted, or raped. (The survey grouped those four crimes in a single question about likelihood.)

People can worry about something they know is unlikely, and that is not irrational. The crimes a pepper spray canister is meant to interrupt, assault, robbery, an attack in a parking garage, are the rare-but-severe kind that people tend not to weigh by the odds. A record-safe year does not make that worry go away, and it does not have to.

The 48-hour buying spike

Fear of this kind does not show up evenly in the marketplace. It shows up in spikes, and we now have a clean, documented case of what a spike looks like. On October 13, 2026, a man in his 60s wearing an electronic ankle monitor attacked customers with a knife in Guwol-dong, Incheon, seriously injuring eight people. Money Today reported what happened to shopping behavior in the two days after:

SNS Insider pegs personal defense as roughly 40% of pepper spray applications and individuals as about 65% of end users, with North America the largest regional market, and it credits growth to "rising personal safety concerns" and to a new premium tier of connected devices: Bluetooth sprays that send GPS alerts to emergency contacts, priced three to five times a basic canister. A falling-crime period and a growing self-defense market are not a contradiction. People buy for who they are and what they have just seen, not only for what the national crime rate says.

(Treat the projections themselves with the usual caution, since they are vendor forecasts rather than measured sales, and different firms size the category differently. The direction, roughly 6% annual growth (5.9% in one forecast and 6.4% in the other), is consistent across them. The spikes are reported retail data.)

What the numbers cannot see

There is one more reason not to let a national statistic close the conversation, and it concerns the statistic itself. The FBI's figures count crimes reported to participating agencies. The Bureau of Justice Statistics runs a separate survey that asks households directly what happened to them, reported or not, and its 2024 results found 23.3 violent victimizations per 1,000 persons age 12 or older, of which only 11.2 per 1,000 were reported to police. About half of violent victimization never enters the dataset behind the headlines.

The Marshall Project's October 2026 guide to FBI crime data spells out the other holes. The FBI's annual reports use statistical models to estimate how much data is missing. The incident-level system (NIBRS) "has been known to contain errors, and information is frequently missing." Definitions of crimes change over time, which changes what the numbers mean. National estimates cannot describe the experience of every community, and crime varies sharply between cities, counties, and even neighborhoods. No national average can tell you what is happening on your street.

None of this makes the drop fake. Two independent systems, police reports and victim surveys, point the same way, and the decline is broad enough to survive a lot of measurement noise. But it does settle one thing: the FBI's number was never a personal risk forecast. It describes the country, and it cannot see the incident nobody reported, the block that skews the average, or the pattern your own experience has already taught you.

And remember the floor: even after the largest one-year drop on record, the FBI estimated more than 1.1 million violent offenses in 2025. Somewhere in that number is someone's parking garage on a Tuesday. The rate is low, but the count is not zero.

The rational middle: matched preparation

The worried reader is not irrational, and not doomed to overreact either. The honest conclusion from all three datasets is that preparation should match your actual routine, your demographics, and your local reality, rather than the latest headline in either direction. Crime falling does not obligate you to stop carrying anything. One viral video does not justify panic-buying a gadget you will never hold again.

If you decide to carry, two rules cover most mistakes. Buy two or three of whatever you choose, one for the coat, one for the bag, one for the car, because the device you do not have on you is the one that fails. And learn its legal footprint: campus policies can ban what state law allows, and shipping rules for sprays differ by state. We keep plain-language references on those rules, including stun gun laws by state and our shipping restrictions page, so you can check before you buy.

More on choosing: our guide to the best self-defense items to carry, whether personal alarms actually work, and what to know when a student carries pepper spray at college.

What to do with both facts

Crime just fell at the fastest rate since 1936, and the FBI's numbers are real, broad, and corroborated. Your fear is also real: it is highest among the groups that report the most fear, it responds to the incidents you have seen or survived, and it prices worst cases at face value rather than by their odds.

The practical answer is to carry what matches your life, legally and consistently. A 48-hour buying spike and a national average are both poor guides to your own risk. The country got safer this year. That is good news, and it changes what the statistics say. It does not change what you want with you when you walk to your own car.