State UCR Programs Point To Lower Murder & Violent Crime In 2023

Using open data to paint the picture of crime in the U.S. in 2023.

I have been posting a regular weekly post first thing on Mondays for quite some time, but I didn’t yesterday because I was hoping that there would be new FBI data to write about. Alas, it did not come so let’s talk about State UCR data instead!

Specifically, let's talk here about what seemingly completed State Uniform Crime Report (UCR) program data suggests about America’s crime trends in 2023.

As a reminder, law enforcement agencies report crimes that occur to a State UCR program which then reports it to the FBI. The FBI gathers all that data and publishes an annual report — usually in September or October.

A wonderful new development the last few years has been State UCR programs publishing their aggregated data for all to see. Most states still have a lag in terms of what they report, so 2022 (or earlier) data is all that is available throughout most of the country. But I was able to find 14 states that have published seemingly complete data for 2023 which can be compared to 2022.

First, some caveats (always with the caveats). These tallies are not final, agencies still have a little while to report 2023 incidents. And there might be agencies within a state that did not report in 2023 that reported in 2022 which would inherently lower the number of reported crimes. These states appear to have reasonably complete data though and any future changes would likely impact along the margins and not change the overall trends. I tried my best to only use states with relatively complete reporting, but at this stage it is just an informed guess. Finally, these percent changes reflect the available data when I went to each program's website and they will undoubtedly change (though hopefully only slightly).

I counted a decline in both murder and violent crime in 12 of the 14 states. Some of these states have small numbers of murders (Rhode Island had 28 in 2023 and Wyoming had 14) or relatively small margins, so those percentages could still flip as more data is added.

There are other states that have some publicly available crime data but I didn’t include them because I have less confidence in the completeness of the reporting. Oregon and Idaho both appear to be missing large numbers of agencies that reported data in 2022, and virtually every big city in Ohio is missing.

There’s also Florida which has 2023 data available (good!) but only for about 28 percent of the state’s population (not as good). That share of Florida’s population showed a 10 percent decline in murder and a miniscule decline in violent crime, for what that’s worth.

Using the State UCR program data in this manner does not help to put a number behind the national crime trends for 2023. It does, however, provide confidence behind the assessment that murder fell sharply in 2023 while reported violent crime likely fell a smaller amount.

Understanding crime trends requires either waiting until the Fall after a year ends or piecing together various interconnected data sources to paint a picture. State UCR data is another helpful puzzle piece while we wait for more data.