Robbery Clearance Rates Are Soaring
Though they're still under 40 percent.
The FBI will report its official 2025 crime statistics sometime this summer or early fall, but their recent switch to monthly preliminary reporting makes it far easier to understand crime and policing trends faster than ever before. The FBI published their data for all of 2025 from thousands of agencies that send monthly data a few weeks ago. There is one trend in the data that I haven't really talked about yet that really stands out:
The clearance rate data for 2025 is still very preliminary, but the monthly data is a pretty good predictor of where things will turn out in the formal Crime in the US release. Right now, nearly 36 percent of robberies that have been reported to the FBI for 2025 have been cleared which, if it holds up, would be the highest national clearance rate for robberies since 1965.
For context, my Saints went 6-11 in 2025 which works out to a nearly identical 35.3 percent winning percentage. So, robberies may have been cleared at the highest rate in 60 years last year, but it still wasn’t great!
Robberies do, however, stand out among other crimes with respect to their clearance rates relative to pre-COVID levels. Clearance rates for most crime types fell enormously in 2020 and 2021 but have returned to their historical norms. Robberies, by contrast, are far exceeding previous levels. Indeed, the robbery clearance rate in 2025 was likely the highest since the 1960s when clearance rate stats were notoriously unreliable.
There are 768 agencies that fit the Real-Time Crime Index inclusion criteria (cities of 50,000 or more, counties of 100,000 or more) that have complete data for both 2023 and 2025 in the Crime Data Explorer. The data for 2025 is still preliminary, so this might be an overstatement, but 619 (80 percent) of those 768 agencies had fewer robberies in 2025 than 2023 while 70 percent of them had a higher robbery clearance rate in 2025 than in 2023.
These figures are subject to change, but only 3 of the 95 agencies that reported 250 or more robberies in 2023 reported more robberies in 2025.
I thought of and largely ruled out a few possible explanations for this change in robbery clearance rates.
A Change in Reporting.
It’s possible that some definitional or reporting system change is causing this increase. The rape clearance rate fell from around 50 percent in 1990 and 2000 to around 30 percent in 2020 and 2025, but that was almost certainly due to a definitional change in how rapes were reported starting in 2013/2014.
Robbery has definitionally changed from a violent crime under the Summary Reporting System to a property crime under the National Incident-Based Reporting System (my understanding of the reason for this change is that classifying robberies as a property crime enables police departments to capture data on what property was stolen). This does mean that the number of robbery incidents rather than the number of victims — like in other violent crimes — gets counted by police departments.
This shouldn’t have any impact on how clearances get counted, but it did come to mind as maybe a possible explanation. It would be easier to buy as an explanation if the robbery clearance rate had started rising when the NIBRS switch occurred, but it fell through 2022 and then started rising.
A Quirk of Monthly Reporting
The FBI’s switch to monthly reporting is terrific, but it comes with the quirk that some agencies don’t report all their data on a monthly cadence. In recent years (since the NIBRS switch) that has generally meant that December clearance rates are lower than other months, but that isn’t the case in the 2025 data. Still, this is the first time we have had preliminary monthly data and it's possible that the grain of salt that we're currently taking needs to be larger, only time will tell.
Agencies still have time to report data, but the effect on the overall annual cc, clearance rate will be minimal even if the same pattern holds and December falls below the rest of the year’s rate. If you add 2,500 offenses to December’s robbery total and don’t add a single clearance then the national robbery rate falls from 35.8 percent to 35.1 percent, still extremely high by historical standards.
A Weird Agency
There’s no Coffee County in the 2025 robbery data as far as I can tell. Every month from nearly every agency is higher than it has been.
A New York/Chicago Thing
New York City and Chicago can do screwy things to national clearance rates. They have thousands of robberies (and other crimes), but don’t always report clearances. Chicago reported crime data but not clearances every year from 1995 to 2020. New York missed 2003 to 2012.
The good news is that both agencies are reporting via NIBRS now so we’ve got their data now.
The other good news is that they sort of cancel each other out in terms of the impact of non-participation on the national clearance rate. New York City reported a 59.9 percent robbery clearance rate in 2025, a very large and impressive improvement from a 46 percent robbery clearance rate in 2024.
Chicago also improved! To the highest reported rate in decades! But it was only from 5 percent in 2024 to 8 percent in 2025 and, as the chart above shows, Chicago is missing many years of clearance rate data.
Both cities have been included in the national clearance rate count for several years now and that certainly doesn’t explain the massive jump pretty much everywhere, so the answer to this question is probably not just a Chicago/New York thing.
Fewer Crimes = Higher Rate
This one likely has some truth to it. In general, less crime does typically lead to higher clearance rates, and 2025 likely had the lowest robbery rate ever recorded in the US (data available back to 1960).
But the connection isn’t ironclad and it isn’t like fewer crime inherently means a higher clearance rate in an agency. When we compare how robbery clearance rates have changed compared to the actual number of robberies in the 95 agencies that had 250+ robberies in 2023, we see maybe some relationship but not an incredibly strong one at the agency level.
And on a national level, decreasing robberies has never been strongly connected with increasing robbery clearances. The last time the US robbery rate fell by a similar amount (from 95.4 robberies per 100k in 2017 to 84.9 per 100k in 2018), the national robbery clearance rate reported by the FBI only rose from 29.7 percent to 30.4 percent.
Police Are Solving More Robberies
As Sherlock Holmes said, "When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.”
Nearly 40 percent (38 of the 92) that had fewer robberies in 2023 than 2025 actually had more robberies reported as cleared.
Clearances can be made by exception, but that is rarely the case in robberies. Take Arizona, for example, which provides an easy portal for breaking down clearances by type. The share of clearances by arrest jumped up from 2023 to 2025 while the other type of exceptional clearances barely budged.
Taking another look at that graph of robbery clearance rates over time but focusing just on the last 25 years shows a steady increase since 2000 that was interrupted by the pandemic.
Perhaps whatever was driving that increase prior to 2020 — be it technology like DNA, cameras, new investigative techniques, more resources, or all of the above — is returning to the pre-existing trend. Perhaps surging robbery clearance rates speaks to larger issues of community trust in law enforcement being lost in 2020/2021 before being regained in the last few years.
Whatever the cause, it’s a good thing to see. But, much like my Saints going from 5 to 6 wins, improving robbery clearance rates from 30 percent to 35 percent highlights just how much work remains to be done on this issue as a nation.
New On The Jeff-alytics Podcast
This week’s I talked with Jennifer Doleac, Executive Vice President of Criminal Justice at Arnold Ventures, about how data and research can dramatically improve outcomes in the criminal justice system. Jen has a new book out called The Science of Second Chances and we talk through what the book tells us about how policymakers (and everyone really) can build a better approach to reducing. Give it a listen below or wherever you get your podcasts!
And, while you’re here, be sure to check out these other great recent episodes of the pod!
FBI Assistant Director Timothy Ferguson.
Orleans Parish District Attorney Jason Williams.
Jens Ludwig from the Chicago Crime Lab.