The Truth Behind Crime Trends

Heavily factoring into current political discourse and the mounting campaign season, conversations of crime levels across America are a heated subject of debate. 

Recent Gallup poll results show that almost 80% of Americans feel crime has become worse across the nation. Over half of Americans polled also believed crime had become worse in the area where they lived. 

The FBI’s UCR crime data provides a more nuanced trajectory of American crime. 

Property Crime

Property crime has maintained a long nationwide downward trajectory, with a modest uptick in crime between 2021 and 2022. Increases in crime are meaningful, and this recent increase might indicate a change in the future dynamics of property crime. However, it’s important to contextualize this change relative to the large decrease in crime the country has experienced over the last decade.   

A state-by-state analysis of FBI data shows that property crime rates increased across most states from 2021 to 2022. 

While the visual representation of change in rates from 2021 to 2022 is striking, only 4 states (Colorado, New York, Vermont, and Washington) have a higher property crime rate in 2022 than they did in 2017, speaking to the overall long-term downward trends of property crime across the United States. 

Larceny, the most common property crime, closely reflects the arc of property crime and has the highest rate of all individual property crimes —1,401.9 per 100k in 2022.

The sharpest increase in recent years of individual property crimes has been motor vehicle theft, which occurs at a much lower rate than larceny, but has shown steady growth since 2019. The 2022 motor vehicle theft rate is 282.7 per 100k. 

The FBI’s UCR program operates at a lag of one year as they collect, analyze, clean, and prepare the data provided by law enforcement agencies across the country. This lag period can produce debate and discord about the current state of crime. To bridge this gap, the FBI releases quarterly data of less granular detail, charting increases or decreases of index crimes from a regional viewpoint as well as broken down by population size.

As of this writing, the FBI quarterly report encompasses the first three quarters of 2023, and their data suggests an overall decline in property crime compared to the same period of 2022 — with an 11% reduction of offenses in the Midwest and a 12% reduction in the West. 

Quarterly UCR rates find that larceny went down 8% in metropolitan counties and 17% in nonmetropolitan counties.

Motor vehicle theft continues to show sharp growth, particularly in the Northeast and South. UCR quarterly data estimates a 35% increase in motor vehicle theft in cities of one million people or more.

Violent Crime

The trajectory of violent crime is a more complex story than that of property crime — 2014 was a record-setting low year since the FBI collected and published national crime data. Since 2014, the national violent crime rate has subsequent peaks and valleys. Unlike property crime, data in most recent years show a decrease in the national violent crime rate.  

There are meaningful differences in the y-axes of aggregate violent and property crime rates. Despite the visual story told in these two graphs, there is still a significantly greater likelihood of being the victim of a property crime than a violent crime.  

The 2022 property crime rate is 1,954.4 per 100,000 people, meaning almost 2,000 people out of every 100,000 will be victimized by a property crime. The 2022 violent crime rate is 380.7 per 100,000 meaning that almost 400 people out of every 100,000 will be victimized in a violent crime. 

Several states experienced an increase in violent crime from 2021 to 2022, while more than half continued to see a decrease. A handful of states have experienced no significant change in the violent crime rate. 

Media coverage tends to focus specifically on homicides, and incredibly serious crimes against persons that also produce shockwaves of fear and insecurity across communities. Given this focus, increased homicides are often conflated with increased total crime. However, homicide trends can have very different trajectories than other crime types. The below series suggests a sharp increase in homicides in 2020 — corresponding with the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. In 2022, the most recent year of available crime data, homicides have decreased.  

Aggravated Assaults follow a similar trajectory.

As with the above plots depicting the trajectory of violent and property crime, there are significant differences in the y-axis. Homicide is incredibly rare compared to all other index crimes recorded by the FBI. A single homicide can significantly alter the homicide rate in a given community. The 2022 homicide rate is 6.3 per 100,000 people while the assault rate is 268.2 per 100,000 people. In contrast, larceny, the most common of the FBI’s index crimes, has a rate of 1401.9 per 100,000 people.

The FBI quarterly report encompassing the first three quarters of 2023 shows that homicide, assault, and violent offenses overall have continued to decrease after their respective peaks in 2020 and 2021.

Q3 assault data shows modest decreases across all population sizes with a 4% drop in metropolitan counties and a 5% drop in non-metropolitan counties. 

Through Q3 of 2023, the FBI reports murder offenses are down in cities of one million people or more by 25% as compared to the first three quarters of 2022 and down 17% across all metropolitan counties and 13% across all non-metropolitan counties. 

Is crime going up or going down?

It is difficult to characterize the movement of crime in simple or sweeping terms. When held in long view, across the nation, the likelihood of being victimized in a crime is significantly lower than it was 20 or 30 years ago. However, this does not hold true across all communities or accurately characterize the probability of each offense. Due to rates and the vast differences in the number of occurrences, aggregate property crime rates can decrease in a city during a spate of motor vehicle thefts.

From 2021 to 2022 most states saw an increase in property crimes. Homicides, assaults, and violent crime overall decreased after an uptick during 2020 and 2021. We see differences in these trends state by state. Different criminal offenses happen for different reasons, and it is important to understand what crimes are increasing and decreasing and in what kind of environments.

Crime occurs at the intersection of a motivated offender, a criminal opportunity, and a lack of capable guardianship.

The Pinkerton Crime Index helps organizations understand the highly localized story of crime and where their community fits in relation to national trends. Working from the FBI’s UCR data and further informed through local law enforcement data, victimization surveys, and a tournament of risk forecasting models, PCI provides risk insights down to the neighborhood level.

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