Guessing What The FBI's 2023 Crime in the US Report Will Say

Making an informed guess about last year's crime trends.

Arguably the best part of parenting small kids is getting to tell them fun little white lies like “there’s a fairy that comes while you’re sleeping and exchanges the worthless tooth you just lost for hard currency” and “the Saints should be good this year” (Note: this joke was written before yesterday's 47-10 demolition of Carolina).

Part of that joy is the chance to take credit for having invented popular sayings such as “put your money where your mouth is” or “reading the tea leaves.”

Which is exactly what I’m going to do in this post, sans wagering any actual money.

What I’d like to do in this post is give a guess as to what the change in national crime will be in terms of murder, violent, and property crime when the FBI’s 2023 figures are released later this month. I think it’s a useful exercise because it lays out what we know, what we don’t know, and how the latter should effect our reading of the former.

I hope to revise revisit these guesses after the FBI’s estimates are released. Also, I think it’s only fair to give me 1.5 percentage points on either side of the guess as a cushion for a “correct” guess. My game, my newsletter, my rules.

The official figures from the FBI should come out in the next couple of weeks, so here is what I think:

Murder - Down 10 Percent in 2023

I think murder fell at the fastest rate ever recorded last year and feel decently confident that it’s falling faster this year. The FBI’s quarterly data for 2023 pointed to a 13 percent decline, our sample of 212 cities had it down 11.7 percent, my collection of data from 31 states that have published 2022 and 2023 data had it down 12.2 percent, and the Real-Time Crime Index has it down 10.4 percent.

So why am I taking the under?

Well, to begin with I suspect that bigger cities — which are overrepresented in our murder dashboard and in the RTCI — had a larger decline in murder in 2023 than smaller cities. Murder was down over 20 percent in cities of 1 million or more and cities of 250,000 to 499,999 according to the FBI’s quarterly, but it was “only” down between 7.3 percent 11.3 in each of the population groups for cities between 1 and 249,999 people. The RTCI shows a similar divide, with murder down 11.2 percent in cities of 250,000 or more and down 8.1 percent in cities below 250,000.

Now, a plurality of US murders — around 40 percent — occur in cities of 250,00 or more, so oversampling those cities is better than under sampling them in terms of predicting the national trend. But it does get me the slightest pause when trying to guess last year’s murder decline.

The other reason for pausing is that two other sources on homicides: the CDC and the Gun Violence Archive showed smaller declines last year. Fatal shootings in the Gun Violence Archive were down 7.5 percent and CDC homicides were down 8.3 precent. Those measures don’t inherently match up exactly with the FBI’s murder tally (neither measure is exactly apples to apples with murder), but they add to my suspicion that the national murder decline was slightly less than the big city one.

Still, murder fell a ton in 2023 and a 10 percent decline would be the largest ever recorded. If it comes in at down 8.5 percent though I won’t be shocked.

Violent Crime - Down 3.5 Percent

Violent crime almost certainly fell in 2023 but I have some uncertainty as to how much. The FBI’s quarterly data for the end of 2023 had violent crime down 5.7 percent but I suspect that’s an overstatement of the decline. The RTCI has violent crime down 2.5 percent last year and I think the actual number will end up somewhere in the middle.

The reason I think this is because of Washington DC and Chicago. DC reported an enormous surge in robberies last summer resulting in a 67 percent increase and Chicago reported a 23 percent increase in 2023. Robbery was down 4.2 percent in the RTCI sample without those cities and down 0.5 percent with them.

Of course you can't just remove two cities, but it does imply that they are having an outsized impact on the trend. Hence my guess that violent crime was down slightly more than what the RTCI sample shows.

Property Crime - Down 2 Percent

The Real-Time Crime Index has property crime up 0.2 percent which translates to essentially no change in analytic terms. So why do I expect property crime fell a bit last year?

TikTok.

I posted last January about how a video on TikTok was leading to massive surges in auto thefts starting in the summer of 2022. That trend carried into and even accelerated in 2023 in many places. Check out auto thefts rolling over 12 months in Henderson, Nevada, Louisville, Washington, DC, and Atlanta to see the obvious impact of the TikTok video.

But, interestingly, the available evidence points to a massive difference between auto thefts in big cities and auto thefts in smaller cities in 2023. Auto thefts were up an astounding 30 percent in cities of 250,000 or more in the RTCI compared to just an 8 percent increase in cities under 250,000.

The FBI’s quarterly data backs this up with auto theft up 30 percent in cities of 1 million or more, up double digits in cities of 250,000 to 1 million, but either up considerably less or down in smaller cities.

I could certainly see a world where property crime was up in big cities last year — exclusively driven by auto thefts — while it was down a fair amount everywhere else. The result would be a reported national decline in property crime that wasn’t necessarily felt uniformly — especially by Kia and Hyundai owners.

Wrapping Up

So there you have it, my guesses are a 10 percent decline in murder, a 3.5 percent decline in violent crime and a 2 percent decline in property crime (+/- 2 percentage points!). The FBI’s 2023 data will released soon and that will tell the tale of whether my guesses are correct, close, or never happened.