FBI reports extraordinary crime drop in the first half of 2024

This brief press release, titled “FBI Releases 2024 Quarterly Crime Report and Use-of-Force Data Update,” reports on the FBI’s latest data on crime.  Here is how it starts:

On Monday, September 30, 2024, the FBI’s Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR) Program released the Quarterly Uniform Crime Report (Q2), January-June 2024, and the National Use-of-Force Data Collection Update, June 2024, on the FBI’s Crime Data Explorer (CDE) at https://cde.ucr.cjis.gov.

The Quarterly Uniform Crime Report (Q2), January-June 2024, provides a preliminary look at crime trends for January through June 2024 compared to January through June 2023. A comparison of data from agencies that voluntarily submitted at least three or more common months of data for January through June 2023 and 2024 indicates reported violent crime decreased by 10.3%. Murder decreased by 22.7%, rape decreased by 17.7%, robbery decreased by 13.6%, and aggravated assault decreased by 8.1%. Reported property crime also decreased by 13.1%.

In this new Substack posting, Jeff Asher explains why these data may be “overstating the trend by a healthy amount.” He goes on:

That said, the second quarter report clearly points to the US crime trends in 2024 even taking the overstating declines into account.  Murder is down at the fastest rate ever recorded, easily eclipsing 2023’s previous record decline. Violent crime is down a fair amount — 4 or 5 percent — and will likely be the lowest reported violent crime rate since 1969 considering that 2023’s violent crime rate was virtually tied with 2014 for that honor.  And property crime is down a ton thanks to the massive decline in motor vehicle theft following several years of huge increases.