Welcome To Crime Data Fall
You've heard of Hot Girl Summer, now the crime data craze is sweeping the land!
Summer is nearly behind us, and Fall is a time for old favorites to return and new loves to appear. The football regular season starts soon for my beloved Saints and my Longhorns beat hated rival Rice last weekend. As a sci-fi fan I’m thrilled that Star Trek Lower Decks comes back for a new season this week and the long-awaited Star Wars Ashoka series has just started. And nowhere is the renewal of Fall more true than with crime data1. The next few months are dominated by crime data releases from federal agencies between now and December.
Here’s what we’ll see between now and the end of the year:
FBI Quarterly Data
When: Late August and Mid-December
Where: Crime Data Explorer
What is it: The FBI started releasing quarterly crime reports in mid-2020 which contains national estimates and raw figures from cities over 100,000 that reported data. This was a great resource in 2020, but far fewer agencies are reporting data to the FBI now under NIBRS than under the old system. As a result, the FBI has not made any national quarterly estimates since the end of 2020. I’m hopeful that this will improve as NIBRS participation ticks up. The raw data from around 230 or so cities each quarter is unaudited and I have found it to be frequently laughably wrong when comparing to publicly available reported. PLEASE don’t rely on this data.
The FBI released quarterly data for Q2 2023 in late August but there was not enough participation for national estimates.
National Incident-Based Reporting System (NIBRS) 2022
When: Early October, probably.
Where: Crime Data Explorer
What is it: The NIBRS report for 2022 should be released sometime in October. Last year it was released on October 5, 2022 which is behind the date SRS data was usually released (typically the last Monday in September) but ahead of when NIBRS used to be released (late October or early November). NIBRS should be improved this year and will provide national estimates for all sorts of crime. The data can be downloaded from CDE but it’s not really clear yet what it will look like given all the changes the program is undergoing.
National Crime Victimizations Survey (NCVS) 2022
When: September or October.
Where: Bureau of Justice Statistics
What is it: NCVS is the nation’s other way of measuring crime trends. This report is necessary because not all crimes are successfully reported to law enforcement and UCR relies solely on data reported to and by law enforcement.
The upside to NCVS is that it provides a unique look at crime trends from a lens that is not impacted by systemic underreporting to police. The downside is that it’s a survey, so it’s less concrete than UCR telling me there were 21,570 murders last year — even if the latter is also an inexact estimate — and homicides are not included in the survey because dead people don’t like to take surveys.
ATF Firearm Trace Data
When: Sometime between now and the end of the year. They released this data in September last year covering 2021 and in December 2021 covering 2020.
Where: ATF
What is it: Every year the ATF publishes data on the results of crime guns that were recovered and traced in the previous year. This is a very rich albeit flawed dataset for understanding trends of crime guns. As the ATF notes, “Not all firearms used in crime are traced and not all firearms traced are used in crime.” That said, this dataset provides unique insights into the quantities and types of firearms being recovered by law enforcement.
Hate Crimes Data
When: December-ish.
Where: Crime Data Explorer
What is it: Hate crimes data is not good. It’s great that we collect it, but it is an enormous mistake to use that data to evaluate trends in American hate crimes.
There are numerous reasons to be skeptical of hate crimes data which I’ve hopefully laid out clearly in the piece linked in the above paragraph. Regardless, it's good to have hate crimes data to try and better understand what may be a trend and what may be a change in reporting.
Possibly hyperbole.
I read this then go to the next door app and watch everyone bitch about crime, it’s.... people live in a totally made up world, I live in the suburbs of Minneapolis. Like my home town of 40k out in the woods was more Dangerous in the 90’s times 2 then the entire metro area. Yes people get shot and crime is here but at such a small scale it’s comical.