Skip to content
Version 1.0.0
Sentencing Law and Policy
Part of the Law Professor Blogs Network

Encouraging FBI data now provides fuller picture of 2023 crime declines

By Douglas Berman

Jeff Asher’s substack has this notable new post summarizing the latest encouraging FBI crime data.  I recommend folks read the full posting, but here are some highlights:

The FBI released quarterly data covering all of 2023 yesterday preliminarily showing a widespread decline in crime nationally last year. There was a 13 percent decline in murder in 2023 relative to 2022, a 6 percent decline in reported violent crime, and a 4 percent decline in reported property crime based on data from just over 13,000 agencies that reported quarterly data through December. The declines were fairly uniform regardless of city or county size with the exception of rising auto thefts in bigger cities and counties. The decline in murder in 2023 is likely the largest one year decline ever recorded….

Murder

Caveats aside, a 13 percent decline in murder nationally — if that is what is shown in the final year-end figures — would be by far the largest one year decline in murder ever recorded (data available back to 1960). The previous largest decline in murder ever recorded was 9.1 percent in 1996, so even a 10 percent decline last year would be the largest one-year decline ever recorded both in terms of percent change and the number of fewer people murdered. A 10 percent decline in murder would mean a drop of more than 2,000 murder victims from one year to the next for the first time ever recorded and around 3,500 fewer murder victims nationally in 2023 than there were in each of 2020 and 2021.

A double-digit percent decline in murder in 2023 (let’s assume some regression in the final numbers and call it 11 percent) would put the 2023 US murder rate at roughly 17 percent below where it was in 2020, largely in line with where it was in 2016 and 2017, and still up around 9 percent above where it was in 2019 (the super preliminary data for 2024 is quite promising — more on that in a few weeks)….

Violent Crime

As I previously noted, calculating national crime rates is inexact and these figures can change slightly from year to year in unpredictable ways making precise comparisons to previous years challenging. A 5.7 percent decline in reported violent crime — as preliminarily suggested by the quarterly data — would be one of the larger annual declines in reported violent crime (it fell slightly faster a few years in the 1990s).

The decline in reported violent crime in the quarterly data suggests 2023 likely had the lowest reported violent crime rate nationally since the late 1960s, even leaving room for the size of the decline to shrink from the -5.7 percent currently shown.

Property Crime

Property crime had a smaller decline in the quarterly data with the fly in the ointment being a surge in auto thefts. This was especially evident in large cities and suburban counties and was fueled by social media showing how to steal Kia and Hyundai cars. The preliminary evidence on auto thefts for 2024, however, looks promising with a 24 percent YTD decline so far in Chicago, 39 percent in New Orleans, 41 percent in Philadelphia, and 10 percent in New York City (to name just a few cities).