On Monday, the FBI released final year-end data on crime in 2023 showing that violent crime continues to drop, with a record-breaking decline in murders. Larceny, which encompasses shoplifting, also fell, even as car thefts remain on the rise. The bureau’s data closely aligns with predictions from independent experts, all of whom estimated steep drops in murders in 2023 and 2024 alike. Indeed, it’s clear that the 2020 murder spike that coincided with the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic has substantially (but not completely) receded.
The FBI’s data comes from police departments covering roughly 94 percent of the population, buttressing its credibility and undercutting politically motivated attempts to dismiss FBI data as unreliable.
Every year, the FBI collects crime data from local police agencies and publishes a final analysis of national crime trends. These reports offer the best, most complete look at crime nationwide. However, they take time to produce. The most recent data, published Monday, covers 2023. The new numbers follow consistent reports from researchers and police agencies showing drops in violent crime and especially murder.
Key findings: crime is down across the board
Nearly all metrics of crime declined in 2023, with murder dropping most precipitously by a record-setting 11.6 percent. When broken down by rate — the number of offenses per 100,000 people — that is a decline of 12 percent. As a result, the national murder rate now hovers around levels last seen in 2017, which is roughly 11 percent higher than where it stood before the pandemic.
Due in large part to a drop in aggravated assaults, the most common violent offense, the number of violent crimes fell by 3 percent. That corresponds to a 3.5 percent drop in the violent crime rate, putting it just barely above historic lows. The robbery rate was also the second lowest since at least 1990.
The rate of larcenies, which encompass shoplifting and other kinds of property theft, also declined, reaching the second-lowest level since at least 1990. (The lowest was during the Covid-19 pandemic, when opportunities for theft were much more limited.) Burglary rates fell by 8.1 percent, setting another record low. However, motor vehicle theft continued to rise sharply, as it has for the past several years. As in previous years, security vulnerabilities in certain automobile brands may be partly to blame.
Notably, the FBI revised several figures from previous years, including murder counts. It now appears that murder fell in 2021 and largely held stable in 2022. Last year’s data showed little change between 2020 and 2021 and a large drop in 2022. Such revisions are expected in every annual report, a common practice with nearly all government-reported data, and likely stem from continued uncertainty around the bureau’s 2021 estimates.
Countering myths about crime data
Some politicians and commentators have tried to sow doubt in crime data, going so far as to argue that FBI data may be fraudulent, manipulated, or incomplete. But those claims are mistaken and undermine our ability to understand and address real challenges to public safety.
First, as noted above, this year’s FBI annual report is based on data from police departments covering 94 percent of the population, well in line with past participation levels. It is true that the FBI saw a sharp, single-year drop in police participation in 2021 as the bureau switched to a new reporting system. But this year’s report, like last year’s, solves that problem by fusing data collected under the new and old reporting systems. Indeed, a close look at this year’s FBI data shows that at least 80 of the 90 largest cities, including New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Washington, DC, contributed a full year of data. We can and should improve how crime data is collected and reported, and some gaps remain, as they always do in a dataset of this size and complexity. But it’s wrong to claim that the FBI’s 2023 annual data is not comprehensive.
Second, the declines reported by the FBI closely match estimates by independent researchers. The Council on Criminal Justice, for example, calculated a 10 percent decline in murders from 2022 to 2023 and a more modest drop in aggravated assaults — consistent with the FBI’s report of a roughly 3 percent decline in both violent crimes and assaults.
Murder statistics are also highly reliable on their own. Law enforcement and public health officials work closely together on murder cases, and as a result, these crimes are tracked in both FBI and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention data. Murder trends in these sources closely track each other and have for years. A small discrepancy opened up in 2021, an anomalous year for FBI data, but the CDC data for 2022 and 2023 data again show declines matching FBI and police sources.
Last, some have pointed to a different government dataset on crime, the National Criminal Victimization Survey (NCVS), to argue that crime has actually risen if one accounts for offenses that are never reported to police. But this is doubly wrong. For one, the latest NCVS report shows no sign of a surge in unreported crime. Additionally, while looking at the survey is an important, complementary way to understand crime, its 2020 and 2021 surveys were anomalous, likely due to pandemic data-collection issues. Removing those years shows criminal victimization levels are relatively similar between 2019 and 2023. That trend is broadly consistent with the FBI’s own data.
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Murder and violent crime fell last year and, according to all available data, continued to fall through midyear 2024. To be sure, the challenge of reducing crime even further remains, especially considering that crime is often unevenly distributed, meaning some cities and neighborhoods continue to experience high rates of violence. Policymakers should use this year’s FBI statistics to identify what policies have helped to reduce crime and work to expand on those gains in the coming year.
