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In praise of efforts to develop the new “Real-Time Crime Index”

By Douglas Berman

I am excited to see this new Substack entry from Jeff Asher talking up the development of a new crime data resource. Here is part of the start of the posting (with links from the original):

One of the greatest challenges to understanding crime trends is that data is frequently old and stale by the time it is received. Imagine only learning about the Texas Rangers winning the 2023 World Series winner 9 months after the last out.  That’s essentially the world of crime trends.

The solution to date for crime data has been to collect data from dozens or hundreds of cities that make it publicly available in order to guesstimate what’s happening nationally.  That’s what our YTD murder dashboard attempts to do and it’s also how groups like the Council on Criminal Justice and Major Cities Chiefs Association approach the problem.

The advantages of this methodology are clear: it’s fast, it uses publicly available data, and it’s reasonably predictive of the national trend.  The disadvantages are equally clear: the data that individual agencies publish is not standardized, there’s a decent sized margin of error — especially when the sample is smaller, you’re stuck doing YTD comparisons which aren’t particularly useful for a good chunk of the year, and going beyond murder boosts the difficulty quite a bit.

All of those problems will hopefully be a thing of the past as we start to build a new project called the Real-Time Crime Index (RTCI).  The RTCI is being undertaken thanks to a grant from Arnold Ventures with the objective of creating a repository of crime data from 500 to 1,000 cities that is updated monthly.  The goal is to more or less mimic what BLS does with employment data to create an understanding of national crime trends in as close to real-time as possible.

This project is being done in collaboration with FBI and BJS — the nation’s arbiters of crime data — with a goal of eventually transitioning stewardship of the RTCI to the Federal government by the end of the grant.

Regular readers will not be suprised to hear that I would also love to see a Real-Time Sentencng Data project in the works, but that would be another remarkably hard data project.  Getting lots more real-time crime data would be a great achievement, and I wish the folks working on the RTCI all the best in their important and valuable endeavors.