A New Crime Data Quiz!

Come test your knowledge of crime data and trends.

A few years ago I made a quiz on crime data and trends along with Toni Monkovic at the NYT Upshot blog. It was fun and interesting to see which questions people got right and wrong (my mom was oh for eleven…sorry, ma!). In that spirit, I have come up with the below quiz with 10 questions on crime data and trends. Select ‘Show Options’ to select an answer (why is this not the default?).

Click on the footnote for the answer and let me know how you did! No cheating!

Question 1¹:

Question 2²:

Question 3³:

Question 4⁴:

Question 5⁵:

Question 6⁶:

Question 7⁷:

Question 8⁸:

Question 9⁹:

Question 10¹⁰:

So, how did you do?

1. Answer: B. Murder likely fell last year based on data from 93 large cities. Murder in those cities fell 5 percent in 2022 relative to 2021 suggesting there was most likely a 2 to 4 percent decline in murder.

2. Answer: B. As of September 2022, 64.4 percent of eligible US law enforcement agencies covering 69.5 percent of the US population were reporting data to the FBI under NIBRS — the National Incident Based Reporting System. That’s up from 62.7 percent and 64.8 percent respectively at the end of 2021 but still far below the 95+ percent of agencies that reported data to the FBI under the old system.

3. Answer: C. The first Uniform Crime Report was published in 1930 though national estimates were not provided until 1960.

4. Answer: E. As of 2020, there were 5.3 law enforcement officer per 1,000 people in Washington DC, the highest for any city in the country. Chicago, St Louis, Baltimore, and New York City round out the top five with between 4.1 and 4.7 officers per 1,000 people.

5. Answer: C. All murders are homicides but not all homicides are murders. Murders are defined by the FBI as “the willful (nonnegligent) killing of one human being by another.” Justifiable homicides — killing somebody who is robbing you — are categorized differently. Murder has nothing to do with if an arrest is made or what the prosecutor does.

6. Answer: D. Nonfatal shooting offenses are lumped in with all aggravated assaults. These crimes are defined as “An unlawful attack by one person upon another for the purpose of inflicting severe or aggravated bodily injury.” So if you shoot somebody in the neck and they live then it is an aggravated assault, and it is also an aggravated assault if you get attacked by a hammer. In theory there are plans to make nonfatal shootings trackable in NIBRS though we aren't to that point just yet.

7. Answer: A. According to the National Crime Victimization Survey, 21.5 percent of rape/sexual assaults were reported to the police in 2021. This was even higher than the share that was estimated to be reported in 2020.

8. Answer: A. Property crime has fallen substantially over the last few decades. There were over 4 million fewer property crimes reported to the FBI in 2020 compared to 2001 (from ~10.5 million to ~6.5 million over that span) including large drops in each of theft, burglary, and auto theft.

9. Answer: E. Louisiana had the nation’s highest murder rate every year for over 30 years until 2020, but the switch to NIBRS has led to widely divergent reporting rates between states — from 0 percent in Florida to 100 percent in lots of states. As a result, there were no estimated murder rates for many states in 2021 and there is no way to say which state had the nation’s highest murder rate.

10. Answer: C. The FBI reported that 54 percent of murders nationally were cleared by arrest or exception in 2020, the lowest number ever reported — data available back to 1960. I talked with Derek Thompson about why this might be the case last summer. The switch to NIBRS means that 2021’s reported murder clearance rate — under 50 percent — is less reliable than in previous years.