Predicting The 2025 Crime Trends

The final post of 2024 looks ahead to 2025.

Ordinarily, predicting the future of crime trends is a futile exercise which will inherently be proven wrong in just a few short months, and, of course, this post will be no exception¹. These predictions will be wrong, but trying to look ahead at next year’s crime trends is a good way to take stock of where we currently stand and set expectations for where things *should* go over the next 12 months.

The main tool I’ll use in predicting 2025’s crime trend is rolling change in crime using data from the Real-Time Crime Index. Measuring the number of crimes over 12 months compared to the same 12 month period a month earlier not only shows the scale of changing crime but gives a good idea about the direction things will go. This is a strategy for evaluating crime trends that Jerry Ratcliffe has endorsed, so that’s good!

What this shows for each month is the percent change in the number of incidents over the last 12 months compared to the 12 months before that. So if there were 100 incidents between February 2023 and January 2024 it’ll compare the percent change relative to February 2022 and January 2023.

Below is the rolling 12 month percent changes compared to the year prior for murder, motor vehicle theft, property crime, and violent crime. I chose murder and motor vehicle theft specifically because those are two crime types undergoing massive changes with the latter having a major impact on the degree of property crime decline nationwide.

Let’s pretend we were doing this exercise 12 months ago in December 2023 using data from the Real-Time Crime Index. How well would that data have predicted the 2024 trends? Using only the data before the cutoff (marked above in gray) I would say that the decline in murder is potentially accelerating, motor vehicle theft is beginning to fall, overall violent crime is relatively steady at that -2 to -3 percent level though it may be heading towards being relatively even, and property crime is relatively even. Extrapolating the potential for declining auto theft — which I did in my first post of 2024 — I like to think that I would’ve predicted a drop in property crime occurring in 2024 though I’m not sure I would’ve foreseen the sharp 20 percent drop in motor vehicle theft that we’ve gotten.

It’s somewhat revisionist, but a logical forecast last year would have pointed to a small decline in violent and property crime with those trends driven by another very large decline in murder and a potential reversal of the auto theft increase. I probably would have understated just how far murder and motor vehicle theft would fall throwing off the sharpness of the reported property crime drop.

With that in mind, let’s turn to predictions for 2025 using RTCI data through October 2024:

Prediction 1 - The Great Murder Decline Levels Off

Murder fell at the fastest pace ever recorded in 2023 and it fell even faster in 2024, but there is evidence that some places that saw large declines over that span are starting to see things level off. I’ll have a post on this next week, but I’d wager we won’t see an enormous decline in murder for a third straight year.

That doesn’t mean that murder will inherently rise, it’s certainly plausible (likely even) that we see another decline in murder in 2025. The largest one-year decline in murder prior to 2023 was 9.1 percent in 1996, so betting on a levelling off in murder — even if we see still a decline — seems like the smart bet.

That said, the last two years five years are largely without precedent in modern American history, so one shouldn’t really rule out any outcome in 2025.

Prediction 2 - Violent Crime Is Largely Even

Reported violent crime fell between 1 and 6 percent in 13 of the 19 years between 2005 and 2024 (assuming a roughly 2 to 3 percent decline last year), so predicting a small decline in violent crime is usually the safe bet. There are some signs that any drop in reported violent crime next year will be relatively slight.

For one, the murder component of violent crime probably won’t see such a large drop next year. Murder makes up only a small portion of overall violent crime though, so the overall impact of a smaller murder decline is relatively limited.

If violent crime is roughly even in 2025 (or increases a little) then the robbery trend in 2024 stands out as potentially a bit of a tell. Robbery was down 1.1 percent in the Real-Time Crime Index sample through October, but while it was down 6 percent in the 10 cities of 1 million or more in the sample, robbery was up 3.5 percent in the other 299 cities under 1 million.

The safe bet, therefore, is that reported violent crime will likely continue to be about even next year. Maybe it will be up a bit or down a bit, but my guess is that the violent crime rate will stay around where it has been for most of the last 15 years. Whether it’s the lowest violent crime rate recorded since 1970 or just very close to it remains to be seen.

Prediction 3 - Property Crime Keeps Falling

Property crime declining again in 2025 is easier to see in the evidence because of two factors:

First, the long term trend is towards declining reported property crime. Reported property crime has fallen nearly every year since 2004 and the the current trendline is not suggestive of a reversal anytime soon. The declines are robust in burglaries, thefts, and motor vehicle thefts across cities of every size.

Second, there’s a long way for motor vehicle thefts to fall to reach pre-pandemic levels, so another large decline in those crimes would be logical. Motor vehicle thefts likely fell a ton, upwards of 20 percent, in 2024, and there’s no reason to suspect that this trend will stop in 2025. Sure, the decline might be less steep, but it could also plausibly be even steeper.

It’s very possible that the national reported property crime rate in 2025 will be the lowest ever reported as the 2024 rate was probably pretty close. Of course somebody could show on social media how to steal certain models of some other car brand leading to a complete reversal of the auto theft decline (please don’t!). Otherwise we should see a continued decline in reported property crime next year.

Conclusion

This forecast relies on some evidence, but it’s much more of a guess than I tend to make.

The most important takeaway from these predictions is that they are makable at all. That enough crime data is available with enough regularly to understand our current crime trends and extrapolate what they might mean for the next 12 months is a new ability.

Some of these guesses will be wrong, and some will be right (I hope), so it’s important to ignore the wrong guesses and glorify the correct ones when we revisit these predictions a year from now. Hopefully these predictions help set expectations for where crime should head in the year ahead providing a baseline for assessing the actual trends many months from now.

Happy New Year to all and thank you for reading in 2024! If you have ideas for topics you’d like to see covered in 2025 please comment below (I can’t promise I’ll get to it, but I can promise I’ll think about it!).

1. If you get the Simpsons reference give yourself a pat on the back!