The FBI Stopped Publishing Quarterly Data, Here's What's Next

Data availability might improve if what's planned really happens.

The FBI stopped publishing quarterly data after Q2 2024 though it is not — I repeat…NOT — a political thing. What comes next should, in theory, be even better, but the timing and quality of delivery remains to be seen.

Allow me to explain!

The FBI began publishing quarterly data in mid-2020 though it has always been something of an odd product. The FBI published quarterly data starting in the second quarter of 2020 with about a 3 month lag between a quarter ending and publication.

The first publications covered data from about 12,000 agencies and provided the first firm evidence that murder was surging nationally in 2020. The nation's crime trends were clearly visible in the Q4 2020 publication from March 2021.

Problematically, historical preliminary quarterly data is not particularly easy to get. The FBI has not archived each quarterly report, so to access previous years all you have to do is find the old URL for the Crime Data Explorer website (it has since changed), plug it into the Wayback Machine, and find the old report. Here’s the first ever quarterly report.

Quarterly data was extraordinarily useful, however, for understanding the nation’s crime trends in 2020 with the quarterly data in early 2021 showing a 25 percent increase (the final data came in around +30 percent) in 2020. Moreover, the quarterly data showed massive increases in murder occurring across the board, with greater than 20 percent increases in in big cities and small towns alike.

Quarterly reporting largely disappeared from 2021 until the end of 2023 as the NIBRS transition led to too few agencies reporting to the FBI to make reliable reports. The quarterly data published at the end of 2023 was very valuable for highlighting the nation’s crime trends in 2023 and giving confidence to my assessments that murder was falling at a record rate.

The quarterly data has never been perfect though and in a lot of ways it is now surpassed by products like the Real-Time Crime Index, NORC’s Live Crime Tracker, and the Council on Criminal Justice. The issue with the quarterly data is that some agencies will underreport early months of data before cleaning up their data later in the year.

This leads to quarterly data always showing a bigger decline than is actually occurring with the gap shrinking until it’s pretty close to what the FBI final data will report by the end of the year. Long time readers may remember that I wrote about this problem a few times last year (see here, here, and here).

The FBI reported quarterly data from Q3 2023 through Q2 2024 and then it stopped. The most recent update is from September 2024 showing the quarterly report through June 2024. This is of limited value because of systemically underreporting early in the year. There was no Q3 2024 report published in December 2024 and there has not been (nor do I expect) a Q4 2024 report to be published this month.

Although the communication around the publication of this product hasn’t been ideal (discontinuation of quarterly reporting hasn’t been acknowledged publicly as far as I know), there’s a sensible explanation for the discontinuation of the quarterly data. The explanation is that the FBI plans to transition to reporting monthly data (with a month and a half-ish lag) which more or less matches what we do at the Real-Time Crime Index.

There are drawbacks to this approach, namely that there will likely be a huge amount of unaudited data and not of it will be in great shape. In addition, this change was first teased as coming at the end of 2024, and then it was the “first few months” of 2025, but the new data is still not available.

I asked the FBI about whether the plans were the same and they said “There is no additional update at this time.” So that's helpful.

I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t concerned that there would be changes to Federal crime/policing data collection given all the changes that are happening everywhere. But there haven’t been any major changes to FBI or BJS data as far as I can tell and I have no reason to suspect this new dataset will appear eventually.

Monthly data from the FBI will be a boon to projects like the RTCI. We’ll be able to audit the data, kick out bad reporting, and reach our goal of identifying national crime trends as they develop from a sample of 500 to 1,000 agencies.

There will be pitfalls to using the monthly data, but the overall quantity of available data should make it a very valuable resource. Ideally, the transition from quarterly to monthly reporting would have been seamless. That hasn’t happened, but thankfully other private tools have stepped up to provide a strong understanding of current crime trends.