On Crime Trends and the Crime Data Challenge
I wrote this up as an op-ed but didn’t get any traction with publishing so I figured I’d put it here as this week’s newsletter. Enjoy!
It didn’t get much attention given that it came two days after last month’s election, but a letter from Republican Representatives Andy Biggs and Jim Jordan demanding answers about whether crime statistics are being manipulated for political purposes is the latest sign of growing distrust in America’s official crime statistics.
This problem persists because the FBI’s crime data is published slowly, has always been imperfect, and can be difficult to effectively communicate. If my favorite MLB player hits a big home run I can pull up data on the pitch location, launch angle, and exit velocity within minutes. If I want to know whether employment fell or rose month I can see the Bureau of Labor Statistics survey on the first Friday of the new month.
Our official national crime statistics, by contrast, are delivered with a lengthy delay, so if I wanted to understand to know how much murder fell in 2023 I had to wait until FBI’s report on 2023 crime statistics was released in September 2024.
There have also always been reporting errors and omissions in the FBI crime data that inevitably increase distrust.
In recent years, the FBI badly overestimated the number of violent crimes in Pennsylvania in 2020, tiny Greenwood, South Carolina initially reported an astounding (and incorrect) 58 murders to the FBI in 2022, and “human error” led to Oakland reporting thousands more violent crimes to the FBI than actually occurred in 2023.
Flaws in our national crime data certainly aren’t new though, and the FBI’s process for estimating missing data has never been accurate (and is in desperate need of an overhaul). These problems are exacerbated by the slowness of data releases, the expectation of precision from a system that can never be precise, and a complex reporting system that is easily misunderstood.
National perceptions of crime are now being driven more by partisanship rather than any semblance of reality for at least half the country, and that’s a new thing. The FBI reported a record decline in murder in 2023 with small declines in violent and property crime, but a recent poll from Gallup found an astounding 90 percent of Republicans saying there was more crime in the U.S. than there was a year ago compared to just 29 percent of Democrats – by far the largest partisan gap ever recorded by Gallup.
Yet, despite all these challenges, we are in a golden age of understanding America’s reported crime trends as they occur.
Murder is falling at the fastest rate ever recorded in 2024 after falling at a historic rate in 2023. Reported violent crime is falling slowly and steadily while reported property crime is dropping substantially thanks to the surge in motor vehicle thefts which began in 2020 starting to come down. We know this because scores agencies of agencies and states have begun publishing their data for all to access as never before.
Collecting and aggregating the data to create knowable trends is the general idea behind the Real-Time Crime Index, a project we launched in September with support from Arnold Ventures.
The RTCI gathers data from hundreds of cities to approximate national trends with roughly a month and a half delay. Right now, the RTCI has data for 309 cities nationwide covering over 77 million people showing a 16 percent decline in murder, a 3 percent drop in violent crime, and a 9 percent decline in property crime through October 2024. History has shown that a sample of this size should approximate the FBI’s official estimates when they’re published next year, meaning we can accurately know our crime trends right now.
The RTCI’s trends match analysis from other organizations such as the Council on Criminal Justice and NORC, and data from sources like the Center for Disease Control and Gun Violence Archive also show large declines in homicides and shootings respectively in 2023 and so far in 2024 adding confidence that these trends are correct.
The FBI is also increasing the speed with which it is releasing data. The FBI has been releasing quarterly crime data since 2020 and they should start releasing monthly crime data at some point.
With greater speed comes greater risk of error though. The FBI’s quarterly data is almost certainly overstating the decline in crime and the monthly data will be unaudited preliminary, and subject to change as agencies catch errors and adjust reporting.
Americans are becoming less attached to the reality of crime trends at the exact moment that these trends have become knowable in near real-time. The FBI’s data has never been perfect, but neither is it so flawed that it obscures the nation’s crime trends. That much is clear thanks to a variety of different sources all saying the same thing about crime in 2024.
Americans should not accept a situation where either crime is rising or the data is wrong. There were likely more than 5,000 fewer murder victims in 2024 than two years earlier, and it behooves us to understand why that happened and what we can do to continue the positive momentum. Denying this reality also denies us the opportunity to learn and save lives in the future. Properly seeing trends – whether they are up, down, or sideways – is the key to learning from both your successes and failures to create better policy and lower crime.
Jeff, you touched on this but let's be clear and specific about WHY "crime" is a political issue in the US.
Republican conservative politicians want to keep people defensive and afraid of The Other - afraid of the BogeyMan du Jour, who is almost always a minority and usually non-White/non-Christian. Demagogues like Biggs and Jordan are bent on finding something, anything that they can use to frighten voters even if/when they have to make it up (pronounced, "lie").
The fact is that every type of US crime has steadily dropped since the early 90's. Both Violent and Property crime rates are at a fraction of those 90's peaks. It is also a fact that (R) pols ignore that data showing dropping crime and, when they can't ignore it, they tried to impugn the accuracy of the data. As you note, due to our historical (underfunded) approach to tracking crime, the data is imperfect. However, it has been consistently imperfect for decades, thus it provides a clear picture of crime rate change over time.
There WAS a brief increase in Assault and Homicide during peak Covid stress when folks were spending more time together in close quarters and there was a hate-spewing sociopath in the WH. When Covid eased and we elected a sane, responsible person as President, Violent crime began dropping to the pre-Covid trend lines.
The reality is that the odds of a random American being the random victim of crime perpetrated by the random Bad Guy in the US are extremely low. A significant %age of Violent crime occurs in a handful of historically violent zip codes and tends to occur between people who are socially acquainted, including among family members. However, (R) pols and our copycat, clickbait media mislead citizens and exaggerate the actual risks of crime.
With the exception of gun crime, US crime data is roughly similar to crime in our peer, European nations. We do suffer far more gun crime due to the high number of guns in the US and (R)s' unwillingness to support the reasonable, sane gun laws that are favored by the majority of US citizens.
Overall crime statistics and what we see in our local papers don't always mirror each other either. The media make money from reporting every police call out it seems so it feels much worse than it is.