The Real-Time Crime Index Shows Declining Crime in 2024

What the RTCI shows through June 2024.

The Real-Time Crime Index is a collection of monthly crime data from over 300 agencies representing more than 75 million people nationwide. As I wrote about yesterday, viewing data from a sample of this size allows for an accurate assessment of crime trends as they occur. There’s uncertainty as to how precise the precision of these trends, but the Real-Time Crime Index makes clear the direction of reported crime in the United States

So, without further adieu, these are the national crime trends through a sample of 304 cities through June 2024.

Murder

The headline statistic is that murder is down a lot as of midyear. June 2024 was the 26th straight month with fewer murders compared to the same month of the previous year dating back to May 2022. Murder was down more than 29 percent in the RTCI sample through June 2024 compared to the sample through June 2021.

I showed the graph of murders in the RTCI sample rolling over 12 months highlighting the shape of the decline yesterday, and comparing the RTCI sample to CDC homicide counts — available through the end of 2023 — reveals a nearly identical pattern between the two measures adding confidence in what the RTCI is telling us.

The roughly 16 percent decline in RTCI matches what our YTD murder dashboard has been saying all year. I assume it’ll also match what the FBI’s quarterly data will show when they’re released in a few weeks. A decline of this magnitude would represent by far the largest one year decline ever recorded with the previous record being a 9 percent decline in 1996.

Murder has largely returned to pre-2020 levels with the first 6 months of 2024 being slightly above where it was on average from 2017 through 2019. The implication from RTCI is that the murder decline — if it persists through the end of the year — would place 2024’s murder rate roughly at or below where it was in 2019. There’s a whole lot of uncertainty in the preceding paragraph though so I wouldn’t say that for sure just yet!

Violent Crime

Overall violent crime was down 5 percent this year through midyear in the RTCI after dropping about half as much last year. Here is what violent crime looks like in our sample rolling over 12 months:

One thing I like about viewing the trend in this manner is that it highlights how much of the national “surge in violent crime” that was reported in 2020 and 2021 was really a surge in murder. Violent crime rose in 2020 and 2021 nationally, but it was relatively minor overall because murder makes up a tiny fraction of all violent crimes.

Property Crime

Property crime was roughly even last year but it is falling a fair amount this year. Both reported burglary and theft fell last year in the RTCI sample, but property crime was basically even because auto thefts were up an astounding 26 percent in the sample. There’s a good chance that the sample is overstating even the tiny increase in property crimes in 2023 which is clear when comparing the change in auto thefts in big cities (+30 percent last year in cities of 250,000 or more) with the change in auto thefts in smaller cities (+8 percent last year).

The decline this year is much less ambiguous thanks to a large decline in auto thefts that is seen in across the sample regardless of city size. Auto theft peaked in December 2023 in our sample and it was down 17 percent in the first 6 months of 2024.

Auto theft rose an astonishing 71 percent nationally between 2019 and 2023 in the RTCI sample, so the 17 percent decline so far in 2024 is nice but doesn’t erase four years of gains.

Auto thefts were the proverbial fly in the ointment in last year’s crime trends, but that isn’t the case in 2024. Crime is unquestionably falling in the United States though a national decline in crime does not mean it is declining everywhere. A historically fast rate of decline doesn’t mean that more cannot be done to reach even lower, and murder may be falling at a historic rate, but there are still cities where murder is rising.

Still, the RTCI provides strong evidence of positive crime trends nationally so far in 2024. Stay tuned for next month’s RTCI update coming soon!