While efforts to collect and analyze trends have made big strides, the public trusts vibes. What is to be done?
The United States is undergoing a sea change in terms of crime data availability, providing more clarity into the nation’s crime trends faster than ever before. As these data came into focus in 2024, they delivered some very positive news about emerging crime trends. The problem is that many Americans do not believe what the numbers reveal. Getting the public to set aside their preconceptions and believe the statistical description of public safety reality is as important as gathering and analyzing the data in the first place. And it may well prove more challenging.
A clearer picture than ever
It’s hard to believe, but the ability to rapidly understand crime trends is a reasonably new phenomenon. The FBI’s Uniform Crime Report has been around since 1930, but access to it used to be difficult to come by. Reports prior to 1995 are only available in scanned PDF format, though some data from the 1980s and early 1990s can be downloaded from the FBI’s Crime Data Explorer website. The first digitized version of the UCR did not come about until 2004.
The report still takes many months after a year ends to be released — typically in September or October of the following year. The good news is that, over the last few years, the emergence of multiple sources of data allow for a nuanced understanding of national trends as they develop.
The FBI began publishing quarterly data in 2020 and plans to begin publishing monthly data in 2025. (These releases are unaudited and contain errors which will mostly be caught and corrected by the time they are officially released a year later.)
Elsewhere, numerous states have begun releasing detailed crime data. This is the same information that the states will send to the FBI for inclusion in UCR but is now being delivered publicly as it is being collected. The Texas Department of Public Safety, for example, reports data from more than 1,250 agencies in Texas covering offenses, clearance rates, arrests, staffing, offenders, victims and more. Almost all agencies report monthly, though a handful report more frequently, but some fall behind on reporting. This information is unaudited and subject to change, but it paints a clear picture of what is happening in every agency in the state.
Other states both big and small are enabling similar access.
Then there are individual agencies producing data on a wide array of topics. This effort largely began around a decade ago under the Obama administration’s Police Data Initiative and has expanded since then. Agencies regularly report data on crime, shooting victimization, staffing, traffic stops, use of force and many other topics. New York City, for example, publishes data on a quarterly cadence covering criminal offenses, shooting victims, crashes, arrests, personnel and around 8 million calls for service each year. Hundreds of other local agencies also publish aggregated daily, weekly, monthly and quarterly crime statistics on their websites.
A gap between perception and reality
These new data sources can be aggregated to paint an accurate picture of the nation’s crime trends. What they show is that murder almost certainly fell at the fastest rate ever recorded in 2024 in the United States, while gun violence declined sharply. Reported violent crime also likely fell slightly, while reported property crime fell a fair amount, driven by a sharp drop in motor vehicle thefts. These trends, and others, are big news.
Overall, murder was down nearly 17% in over 309 cities with available data through October, covered in the Real-Time Crime Index. In 2024, murder fell by 32% in Washington, D.C., 17% in Baltimore, down 37% in Philadelphia, 26% in Dallas and 18% in Los Angeles.
Pulling back the focus, violent crime was down around 4% in the Real-Time Crime Index sample of cities through October, despite an increase in violent crime in New York City, while property crime was down 9% thanks largely to a 20% drop in motor vehicle theft.
The sharp decline in murder shown in the Real-Time Crime Index matches other sources that say the same thing. The FBI reports large drops in crime in its quarterly data, the Gun Violence Archive points to a 13% decline in shooting victims last year, the CDC shows a large drop in homicides and reporting from other outside organizations like NORC and the Council on Criminal Justice say the same thing.
This is not to say that 2024’s crime trends are simple — such trends rarely are — merely that there are more statistics available in close-to-real-time to paint a fuller picture than ever before. And most of those statistics say the country is getting safer in some meaningful ways.
Yet despite this information, much of the public remains convinced crime is rising. A recent Gallup poll found that 64% of Americans say crime rose nationally in the last year, with an enormous partisan gap between 29% of Democrats, 68% of Independents and 90% of Republicans saying it rose. Clearly people’s overall political worldviews, which is to say their preconceptions, is the most powerful factor shaping their belief about violence nationwide.
This points to the desperate need for more effective communication about crime trends to most Americans.
Additionally, while some states have made tremendous progress in publishing accurate crime data with minimal delay, other states lag far behind. Some states provide virtually no information on crime trends publicly, and there are still major cities that don’t even provide aggregated crime counts.
Why we need to bridge the divide
The importance of rapidly identifying emerging crime trends is not a trivial issue. While views of the economy do vary widely based on partisan affiliation, few Republicans assert that the U.S. is in a recession when it’s not, nor do Democrats vice versa — because there are solid economic definitions of that and other terms, and data that deliver an objective truth about the state of affairs. On crime, the nation continues to rely on the eyes of hundreds of millions of beholders — a reality that has serious consequences for policymaking.
Consider U.S. policy toward crime in the mid-1990s. Criminologist James Alan Fox in 2023 recalled his involvement in crime reduction policymaking at a time when murder was seemingly skyrocketing. Fox writes:
“Presenting at the February 1995 Annual Meeting of the American Academy for the Advancement of Science, I tried to be as provocative as possible, seeking to encourage a prevention-based policy response and an investment in youth. In this presentation, I focused on the surge in juvenile homicide, indicating that the problem could worsen in light of the expanding youth population. I described the situation as ‘the calm before the crime storm,’ along with some other colorful descriptors. I suggested a possible ‘bloodbath’ (not literally, of course), unless we prioritized funding for prevention programs.”
Policy was being made based on assumptions that violent crime would continue to surge, but when the FBI released its 1994 UCR report in November 1995, it showed a 4% reduction in murder. Real-time data at that time would have shown a 7% decline in murder underway in 1995 as America had entered its Great Crime Decline.
While crime data remain flawed at the local and national level, the cracks are slowly but surely being repaired. The next — and perhaps bigger — challenge will be getting people to believe the information describing public safety reality rather than relying on the vibes they feel, or those that politicians with their own motives seek to convey.