FBI reports remarkable crime drop to begin 2024

This official FBI press release reports on the basics of today’s release here of the FBI’s Quarterly Uniform Crime Report (Q1). Here is the great news:

The Quarterly Uniform Crime Report (Q1), January-March, 2024, provides a preliminary look at crime trends for January through March 2024 compared to January through March 2023.  A comparison of data from agencies that voluntarily submitted at least two or more common months of data for January through March 2023 and 2024 indicates reported violent crime decreased by 15.2 percent.  Murder decreased by 26.4 percent, rape decreased by 25.7 percent, robbery decreased by 17.8 percent, and aggravated assault decreased by 12.5 percent.  Reported property crime also decreased by 15.1 percent.

Jeff Asher in this substack post at Jeff-alytics provides this important context:

The FBI released data for the first quarter of 2024 today reporting a massive decline in crime across the board in the first quarter of 2024 compared to the first quarter of 2023.  The data release only covers three months of data and around 77 percent of the nation’s population, and it is extremely preliminary with agencies having months to report new incidents and correct problems.  In other words, crime almost certainly declined nationally in the first three months of 2024 compared to the first three months of 2023, but the FBI’s data is almost certainly overstating that decline.,,,

Overall, my impression is that the trend direction shown in the FBI data through the first quarter is likely correct but that the overall percent changes are almost certainly overstated by a good bit. Violent and property crime are probably not down 15 percent nationally (which would be far and away the largest one year decline ever recorded in both categories), but they are likely down a healthy amount.  Murder is down a ton, probably historically so at this point in the year, but probably not 25 percent nationally.