The FBI's Data Shows A Massive Decline in Crime in Q1 2024, But Is It Accurate?

Making sense of the quarterly data for January through March 2024 released by the FBI today (which means you get two posts in one day!).

The FBI released data for the first quarter of 2024 today reporting a massive decline in crime across the board in the first quarter of 2024 compared to the first quarter of 2023. The data release only covers three months of data and around 77 percent of the nation’s population, and it is extremely preliminary with agencies having months to report new incidents and correct problems. In other words, crime almost certainly declined nationally in the first three months of 2024 compared to the first three months of 2023, but the FBI’s data is almost certainly overstating that decline.

The quarterly data can be prone to reporting errors since it is unaudited, and agencies have nearly a year to correct problems in the data before final submissions are made. As such, I would urge strong caution into reading too much into the raw percent changes and focus on the overarching picture. Almost all crime data is imperfect, and the quarterly data adds an important imperfect piece to the national crime trend jigsaw puzzle.

The FBI has never reported data for the first quarter of a year before (quarterly data reporting began in mid-2020 and there weren’t sufficient agencies to report national figures between the end of 2020 and Q3 2023). So there is no way of gauging just how much the above trends shown are overstating the actual national trend.

I tried to do a basic audit of the available individual city data (Table 4) in order to figure out how reliable the underlying data is. In doing this exercise I found places where violent crime was basically spot on compared to publicly available data (like Phoenix, Philadelphia, Houston, Seattle, San Antonio, and Denver), places (like Washington, DC, San Diego and Long Beach) where the FBI’s data is understating declines, and places (like Baltimore, Dallas, and New York City) where things are clearly quite wrong in the FBI data (violent crime in Baltimore and Dallas is down but nowhere near as much as suggested by the FBI’s data, and NYPD data showed a small uptick in violent crime in Q1 2024).

Overall, my impression is that the trend direction shown in the FBI data through the first quarter is likely correct but that the overall percent changes are almost certainly overstated by a good bit. Violent and property crime are probably not down 15 percent nationally (which would be far and away the largest one year decline ever recorded in both categories), but they are likely down a healthy amount. Murder is down a ton, probably historically so at this point in the year, but probably not 25 percent nationally.

Confidence in the assessment that the overall trends are correct comes from the matching data available from other sources. Our murder dashboard shows murder down nearly 19 percent this year in 265 cities and our sample at the end of Q1 2024 was down around 20 percent adding plausibility to the FBI’s findings of a large decline in murder nationally in 2024. I also published this morning about a large decline in auto thefts in cities with available data which is more or less in line with what the FBI is reporting. Finally, the Major Cities Chiefs Association showed a 17 percent decline in murder and an 8 percent decline in violent crime in 68 big cities for the first quarter of 2024.

The FBI’s quarterly data is very preliminary and prone to errors, so it is likely overstating the trends it sees. That said, the FBI’s data on top of other preexisting data sources paint a consistent story of falling crime in the US in the first half of 2024.

A data source can be accurate even if it is preliminary and imprecise.