The FBI Did Not Release Quarterly National Crime Estimates for 2022 Today

Q4 2022 is the 8th straight quarter without enough agencies reporting for national estimates to be made.

The FBI introduced a neat product in the fall of 2020: quarterly crime estimates released about 3 months after the previous quarter had ended. The quarterly crime estimates were critical for understanding the scale of 2020’s murder increase well before the year was ending, nearly a year before the numbers detailing the surge in murder were formally released.

The FBI published quarterly estimates for the second, third, and fourth quarters of 2020 and they were hugely helpful. Then came the messy switch to NIBRS, thousands of agencies failing to report data to the FBI, and the end of quarterly crime estimates nearly as quickly as they had begun.

Now it is March 2023 and the FBI is reporting that they will not be publishing national crime estimates for all of 2022. This marks 8 straight quarters without national estimates.

The good news is that 12,820 agencies reported quarterly data to the FBI, nearly 68 percent of all law enforcement agencies in the US. That’s up from 12,104 in the third quarter and 11,490 in the second quarter of 2022.

The bad news is that not enough big city agencies are reporting data which is preventing national estimates from being made. Only 8 cities with a population of 1 million or more reported 2022 crime data to the FBI and only 6 of those cities reported crime data for both 2021 and 2022 — so a comparison can be made — to the FBI. New York City and Los Angeles failed to report 2022 data and Chicago and Philadelphia reported incomplete 2021 data.

As the FBI explains it:

Like most crime data collections within the UCR Program, coverage in the Quarterly Uniform Crime Report is based on the population served by reporting law enforcement agencies. When population coverage thresholds are met, the data represented in the Quarterly Uniform Crime Report may consist of additional downloadable data that show the percent change in offenses known to law enforcement when comparing data for the same time frame of the previous year, by population group and by region, respectively.

For the 2022 Quarter 4 release, these data trends by region and aggregate population group are not available due to limited representation by the nation’s most populous cities. When a substantial amount of data is missing – like large volumes of crime data from the nation’s most heavily populated cities – there is a general concern that the data received may not represent what would be experienced if all data were received. National crime trends are especially affected by agencies covering populations of 1,000,000 or more inhabitants. Without a minimum 60 percent population coverage for these most-in-population cities, the FBI is unable to make confident statements about national crime trends for the 2022 Quarter 4 data release.

You can download data for over 200 agencies reporting 2021 and 2022 data though 26 of the agencies reported incomplete 2021 data. The cities with complete data show a 10 percent reduction in murder, but the FBI does not audit data from these cities though so it may be wrong.

In fact, a quick glance shows many agencies have bad murder data. Dallas, for example, shows 157 murders in 2022 which is well below the 214 murders the agency reported publicly. The FBI shows 234 murders in Memphis compared to 288 reported by the Major Cities Chiefs Association (MCCA). Columbus had 18 fewer murders reported by the FBI compared to MCCA while Cincinnati shows just 47 murders in the FBI data compared to 77 in MCCA.

Some day we will start getting reliable and somewhat timely crime data, but the FBI’s quarterly data release for March 2023 shows pretty clearly that that day is not today.