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Sound advice for assessing encouraging crime data at the start of 2025

By Douglas Berman

In this post last month, I flagged lots of encouraging data from a number of big cities about homicide trends at the start of 2025.  That post cautioned about drawing strong conclusions or having firm expectations based on “early” crime data, but I still found the numbers heartening.  Writing in the same vein, Jeff_Asher has this new post at Jeff-alytics that mixes caution with optimism under the full title: “Take Early Crime Data Seriously But Not Literally; It’s too early and the reporting is too flawed to reach conclusions just yet!”.  I recommend the full post, and here are excerpts (with links from the original):

The first update to the Real-Time Crime Index was released last week covering January 2025. This update showed a 15 percent drop in murder, a 13 percent decline in violent crime, and a 15 percent decline in property crime through January 2025 relative to January 2024 in a sample of more than 340 big city and county agencies. More than 92 million Americans are represented in this month’s sample, our biggest sample by population yet….

The decline reported in the RTCI sample matches the eye test as big cities like New York, Chicago, Philadelphia, St Louis, New Orleans, Denver, and Los Angeles are all reporting large declines in nearly every category of crime so far in 2025.

That said, there are several reasons why it’s probably a bit too early to draw any definitive conclusions about where crime is headed nationally in 2025…. My personal take on the first month of data is that crime, including murder, is down a lot though it will take some time to understand just how much. The RTCI is useful for understanding that trend though the usefulness will only increase as the year goes on. If the February data shows the same pattern then we can start more seriously thinking about the nation’s crime trends for 2025.

I highly encourage folks to read the full Jeff-alytics post to review the “several reasons” not to assume too much about what the eary 2025 crime data might mean for all of 2025. That said, I still find myself getting quite hopeful about the early trends.