FBI Quarterly Data Points to Declining Crime in 2023

The FBI released Q4 data yesterday so that means two posts in one week.

Preliminary Change in Reported Crime Through Q4 2023 by Population and Crime Type (Source: FBI)

The FBI released quarterly data covering all of 2023 yesterday preliminarily showing a widespread decline in crime nationally last year. There was a 13 percent decline in murder in 2023 relative to 2022, a 6 percent decline in reported violent crime, and a 4 percent decline in reported property crime based on data from just over 13,000 agencies that reported quarterly data through December. The declines were fairly uniform regardless of city or county size with the exception of rising auto thefts in bigger cities and counties. The decline in murder in 2023 is likely the largest one year decline ever recorded.

About 82 percent of the US population is covered by the quarterly data for 2023 released yesterday which is up about 5 percentage points relative to the Q3 data. The FBI won't release final data on crime in 2023 until October of this year, so the quarterly data covering most of America is the best look at American crime trends that we will get until midway through the NFL season.

There are a few caveats to remember when evaluating quarterly crime data.

• First, the FBI data is preliminary, so take the information with the proper grain of salt (crime data should always be served with a grain of salt). Agencies still have some time to report 2023 data to the FBI, so these numbers are by no means final and will undoubtedly change a bit between now and October.

• Second, the FBI data only measures reported crime, and we know that some crimes are less likely to be reported to police than others. We assume almost all homicides are reported, but BJS surveys show that around half of violent crimes and 30ish percent of property crimes get reported.

• Third, the FBI tends to update its estimates a year after initially publishing them, so the estimated rates today probably won’t be the estimated rates in October which won’t be the estimated rates next year.

• Fourth and finally, appreciating and contextualizing a downward trend does not signal approval for the observed level of crime — there is always room for improvement and 18,500 murders nationally can be both improvement from recent years and still too many murders nationally.

Murder

Caveats aside, a 13 percent decline in murder nationally — if that is what is shown in the final year-end figures — would be by far the largest one year decline in murder ever recorded (data available back to 1960). The previous largest decline in murder ever recorded was 9.1 percent in 1996, so even a 10 percent decline last year would be the largest one-year decline ever recorded both in terms of percent change and the number of fewer people murdered. A 10 percent decline in murder would mean a drop of more than 2,000 murder victims from one year to the next for the first time ever recorded and around 3,500 fewer murder victims nationally in 2023 than there were in each of 2020 and 2021.

A double-digit percent decline in murder in 2023 (let’s assume some regression in the final numbers and call it 11 percent) would put the 2023 US murder rate at roughly 17 percent below where it was in 2020, largely in line with where it was in 2016 and 2017, and still up around 9 percent above where it was in 2019 (the super preliminary data for 2024 is quite promising — more on that in a few weeks). Murder was down or even in 163 of the 232 cities of 100,000 or more (70 percent) that provided data to the FBI for both 2022 and 2023, yet there were still outliers like Memphis, Dallas, and Washington DC that experienced sizable rises.

US Murder Rate 1960 - 2023 (With Approximated 11 Percent Decline in 2023)

Violent Crime

As I previously noted, calculating national crime rates is inexact and these figures can change slightly from year to year in unpredictable ways making precise comparisons to previous years challenging. A 5.7 percent decline in reported violent crime — as preliminarily suggested by the quarterly data — would be one of the larger annual declines in reported violent crime (it fell slightly faster a few years in the 1990s).

The decline in reported violent crime in the quarterly data suggests 2023 likely had the lowest reported violent crime rate nationally since the late 1960s, even leaving room for the size of the decline to shrink from the -5.7 percent currently shown.

Showing My Work

The FBI reported a violent crime rate of 369.8 per 100k in 2022 according to Table 1 of the Crime in the US (CIUS) report and a violent crime rate of 380.7 according to the figures currently on the Crime Data Explorer (CDE). The difference in these figures comes about because the FBI changed its definition of rape in 2013 and now produces two different national rape counts under what it calls the ‘legacy’ and the ‘revised’ definitions.

The 2022 CIUS table uses only the legacy definition for uniformly calculating violent crime using a definition that's common to every year since 1960. The CDE figures, by contrast, use the revised definition of rape after 2016 but not for 2013 to 2015 for some unknown reason. Using the revised definition of rape should raise the violent crime rate for every year since 2013 and would also make it much harder to compare more recent violent crime rates with historical rates. As such, the CIUS data table is better for making historical apples-to-apples comparisons and is what I tend to rely on.

So how would 2023 — given a likely decline in violent crime — compare historically?

The FBI reported a violent crime rate of 363.6 per 100k in 2014 per the CIUS table. A violent crime rate of 360 per 100k was initially reported in 1970 but it was revised upwards slightly after that above what is now the 2014 rate. The reported national violent crime rate in 1969 was 328.7 per 100k, so the 2014 figure is the low water mark between 1970 and 2022.

Assuming roughly average population growth in 2023 and no major upward revision to 2022's rate, then a reported decline in violent crime of at least 1.2 percent would lower the reported violent crime rate from 369.8 per 100k in 2022 to below 2014’s estimate in 2023.

As such, and despite the vagaries of crime data, the quarterly crime data suggests 2023 likely featured the lowest reported violent crime rate in the US since the late 1960s. We will have to wait until October to know for sure though.

Property Crime

Property crime had a smaller decline in the quarterly data with the fly in the ointment being a surge in auto thefts. This was especially evident in large cities and suburban counties and was fueled by social media showing how to steal Kia and Hyundai cars. The preliminary evidence on auto thefts for 2024, however, looks promising with a 24 percent YTD decline so far in Chicago, 39 percent in New Orleans, 41 percent in Philadelphia, and 10 percent in New York City (to name just a few cities).

About Quarterly Data

The FBI’s data adds confidence to the previous assessment of the quarterly data released by the FBI in December. None of these findings should come as a surprise because they match data from cities and State UCR programs that has been available for quite some time.

Quarterly national estimates are a relatively new thing for the FBI, so it’s not fully clear exactly how well these estimates will mimic the national trend when it is released later this year. The only other time that the FBI released Q4 data was in 2020 and that data did a pretty good job of projecting the national trend from just under 13,000 agencies — slightly fewer than reported in 2023.

The quarterly data did well overall in 2020 though it undersold the increase in murder a bit. There are reasons to think that the Q4 2023 data won’t suffer from that problem quite as much. The Q4 data in 2020 didn’t include cities with enormous increases in murder like New York City (+47% increase in murder in 2020), Chicago (+57%), Philadelphia (+36%) and New Orleans (+66%) which undoubtedly contributed to understating the national trend in murder. Cities like Chicago, Los Angeles, and New Orleans aren’t in the quarterly data for 2023 but cities were much closer to the apparent national trend in 2023. Other major cities like New York City, Philadelphia, Las Vegas, and San Antonio were not included in 2020’s quarterly data but are included in 2023.

It's worth noting that violent crime increased in 2023 in some cities that didn’t report quarterly data to the FBI like Chicago and Oakland, but it’s hard to know whether that will be offset by cities like Atlanta, New Orleans, and Los Angeles that publicly reported declining violent crime in 2023 but didn’t report quarterly data. Still, it would be wise to expect some regression towards the middle in the final year end data and be pleasantly surprised if it doesn’t happen.

Conclusion

The quarterly data is very preliminary and agencies still have a bit of time to report data. This data release does an excellent job in outlining the contours of the nation’s crime trends much faster than we’d get by waiting until October. We won’t know the final crime estimates for another seven months, but the quarterly data paints the picture of a historically large decline in murder accompanied by smaller reported declines in violent crime and property crime in the United States last year.

On to assessing 2024!