2024 Popular Sentiment and Crime Stats, and Lessons for 2025.
Americans diverge on how much of a problem crime is and how to approach it. In 2024, Republicans decried what they insisted was rampant crime, while Democrats touted what they said were historic reductions.
Even though the presidential election is behind us, fundamental questions about the prevalence of crime remain unanswered: Are Americans safer and better off than they were one year ago or not?
Just the facts
The narrative that crime is rampant in the United States is dominant at the moment. In 2023, according to Gallup, 77% of Americans believed crime was rising — the highest point since 1995. In 2024, 64% of Americans believed that crime was increasing.
Although people believe there is less crime where they live than in the nation as a whole, the trend lines are similar. In 2022 and 2023, 56% and 55% of Americans believed crime in their neighborhoods was up — the highest rates since the 1970s. In 2024, 49% of Americans still believed crime was up in their neighborhood.
The problem with this narrative is that facts also matter.
An alternative narrative prioritizes what experts believe is the best way to capture crime prevalence — two government-administered programs. The FBI’s Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR) Program and the Bureau of Justice Statistics’ National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS) provide the fundamental reference points.
Looking through these two lenses, we can examine violent crime, property crime, total crime and murder trends in the United States and New York.
Here, we find that violent crime victimization, both violent crimes reported and not reported to the police, is down near historic lows. (Crime victimization is measured using a nationally representative survey of nearly 250,000 people, regardless of whether the crime is reported to the police or goes unreported.)
Before 2001, perceptions of crime and crime victimization numbers generally moved in sync; since then, the two trends, perception and reality, have become unaligned.
When we look at the “serious” violent crime victimization rate (rape / sexual assault, robbery or aggravated assault) per 1,000 people 12 and older from 1993 to 2023, it also shows victimization near historic lows.
Next, we can chart violent crime reported to the police and citizens’ perceived crime prevalence. Again, we see that violent crime is near historic lows.
Looking at trends another way, we can plot the rate of violent crimes reported to the police per 100,000 people from 1960 to 2023, with 2024 estimates based on data through June 2024. This shows that violent crime in 2024 is lower than at any point since 1970.
Some people have claimed that the decline in reported crimes is merely a function of less reporting and less enforcement, not less crime. That’s not consistent with the available data.
First, the correlation between violent crime victimization surveys (which include both crimes reported to the police and those not reported) and police-reported violent crime is an almost perfect linear relation. These data clearly demonstrate that violent crime reported to the police and self-reported violent victimizations move in lockstep. That insight is supported by looking at the percentage of violent victimizations reported to the police; there’s substantial consistency in the number over time.
What about homicides as an especially serious, albeit small, subset of violent crimes? The FBI UCR program collects criminal homicide data. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention also collect homicide data. Both indicators show a big spike during the pandemic, followed by a sharp decrease. Given their correlation, we look at the FBI police reported murder rate.
From 2019 to 2020, the United States experienced the biggest one-year increase in murders in over a century. The murder rate jumped roughly 30% and reached seven murders per 100,000 — a rate not experienced since 1996. The increase occurred in all areas: urban, suburban and rural.
By 2024, the increase had vanished. This year, we are experiencing a historic double-digit decrease (the FBI reported a 23% decline in the first six months of 2024), and the United States has returned to post-1990 normalcy.
It is not only the FBI UCR that shows a sharp decrease in murders in 2024. Jeff Asher compiles real-time data from 277 cities. The dashboard he built shows a 16% decrease in 2024 compared to 2023, with most data updated through December. The Major Cities Chiefs Association quarterly survey of 70 major U.S. cities also shows that murders were down 18% through September 2024 compared to the same period in 2023.
The specifics on property crime
But that’s just violent crime. What about property crime, which may not be as scarring to individuals but nevertheless shapes their perception of crime and disorder?
The NCVS collects information from a nationally representative sample of U.S. households on property crimes, both those reported and not reported to the police. It includes both attempted and completed crimes. In 2023, almost one-third of property victimizations were reported to the police.
Here, property crime is defined as personal victimization (theft/larceny) and household victimization (burglary, trespassing, motor vehicle theft and other theft). The survey uses a hierarchical rule that classifies the crime according to the most severe event that occurred.
The property crime victimization rate per 1,000 households has fallen considerably from 1993 to 2023, with a few exceptions. By this measure, property crime victimization is at or near historic lows.
We see a similar trend when looking at the rate of property crimes reported from the police from 1960 to 2023, with 2024 estimates based on data through June 2024.
The correlation between property crime reported to the police and property crime victimization is almost a perfect linear relation.
As with violent crime and violent crime victimizations, the alignment between the reported crimes and victimization surveys is remarkable — undermining any theory that crimes are suddenly happening in far greater numbers than they are being reported.
Stepping back and combining felony violent and property crimes, what the FBI calls index crimes, trends show crime in 2024 was down and significantly low by any reasonable historical measure.
The narrative that crime is at a historic high simply does not correspond to reality. The argument that there is less reporting is baseless, as is the idea that we are not capturing the link between crime and disorder.
What about New York?
In New York State, murders are down outside New York City to levels not before experienced in the modern crime-tabulation era beginning in 1965. New York City’s murder rate is also near the historic low of 2017, when the city experienced the lowest murder rate since the early 1950s. We focus here on the murder rate outside New York City.
The decrease in murders outside of New York City is driven by sharp decreases in gun violence. In 2024, the counties outside the city had the lowest number of shootings on record. The decrease in gun violence is especially significant in the 28 jurisdictions in the Gun Involved Violence Elimination (GIVE) program. GIVE provides state funding to local jurisdictions that account for 90% of violent crime in New York outside New York City.
Overall crime in the counties outside New York City has declined significantly in recent years; the 2024 numbers showing a 10% decline in 2024 compared to 2023 are based on estimates from data from January through September. In New York City, crime is down 18% since the new police commissioner assumed her position, and it seems that this incipient new trend will continue in 2025, returning crime to levels experienced in the 2010s.
How do we square the circle?
The view that crime is raging and the one that it’s at or near historic lows might seem like an irreconcilable paradox. But there’s a way to reconcile the two.
In large numbers, it seems, people do not trust the people running the criminal justice system and reporting on crime. Relatedly, public sentiment used to reflect crime conditions, but for the past several years, it’s grown increasingly partisan.
A criminal justice policy that considers public sentiment as its sole reference for policymaking must be balanced with on-the-ground facts and deliberation. It is dangerous that partisan views are preferred to expertise, the nonrational aspects of opinion are overvalued and the public forum is highly polarized. By the same token, an expert narrative that overlooks public sentiment is likely to result in profoundly unrepresentative and undemocratic policies. There is ethical value in public sentiment and emotions, and we are wrong to ostracize them outside the sphere of relevance.
The first step forward is to restore trust in crime reporting and confidence in the government’s ability to deal with crime swiftly and effectively. We need more transparency and accountability from police departments in particular.
The second step is to recognize that public sentiment may well be linked to an idea advanced by Franklin Zimring and Gordon Hawkins years ago that “crime is not the problem, violence is.” This means that, while criminal activity matters, the most significant issue in the public mind is lethal violence. Violence drives public sentiment and fear of crime, and it must be addressed swiftly when it increases as it did in 2020.
To test this idea of the centrality of violence in shaping public sentiment, we examine the relationship between murders and public sentiment.
While there was no correlation between public perception that crime is rising and overall crime trends (see figure 1 & figure 3), the correlation between murder and perceived increases in crime is high. People believe crime is down when murders are down, and vice versa. If we want to develop a reliable public sentiment meter, we must understand how voters perceive and fear violence and lethal violence in particular.
Three final considerations should guide us going forward.
First, when there is a sharp shift in murder rates, increased cleavages will likely occur in between-group attitudes (e.g., Republicans vs. Democrats), and there will likely be an overall change in public opinion toward that issue. When subsequent data are released that does not represent a major shift, little if any change will likely occur until another sharp shift takes place. The question is whether the 12% decrease in murders in 2023 and the 16% or higher decrease of 2024 will result in between-group shifts, in particular Republican voters, in 2025.
Second, in addition to crime data and public sentiment becoming unaligned after 2001, a major transformation in public opinion dynamics occurred in 2020 and consolidated in the 2024 election. Namely, growing numbers of Americans see crime through pure partisan lenses. In 2001, the views of Republicans, Independents and Democrats on crime prevalence were indistinguishable. In 2024, there is a gap of almost 60 percentage points between how Republicans and Democrats perceive crime. The question of how those patterns will move in 2025 under a new president remains open.
Third, trust in government has reached historic lows. There appears to be an inverse relationship between perceived crime prevalence and trust in government. Put another way, fighting crime and restoring trust in the government’s ability to fight crime must be seen as interrelated activities.
In short, even as America and New York are experiencing significant crime reductions, due to significant fragmentation and polarization, many people remain convinced that things are trending in the wrong direction. More than before, people only trust the government response to crime if it coincides with the political position they prefer. This is a problem that needs urgently to be solved. We need broad nonpartisan social and political agreements on how to fight crime, particularly lethal and violent crime, and how to measure its prevalence and incidence.