Crime continues to decline nationwide, as the FBI’s latest data snapshot released Monday showed killings, shootings and muggings are trending down through the first six months of 2024.
The Quarterly Uniform Crime Report, which covers January through June, reported a 10% decrease in violent crime and a 13% drop in property crime throughout the country when compared to the same time period last year.
The FBI said murders are down 23%, rapes are down 18%, and robberies and aggravated assaults are down 14% and 8%, respectively, over that span.
Major crimes have fallen in the big cities that often drive national crime trends, according to the data.
Cities with 1 million or more residents — such as New York, Los Angeles and Chicago — saw a 33% drop in killings through the first half of the year, per the data, and a 10% decline in violent crime overall.
Meanwhile, cities with between 500,000 and 999,999 residents — such as San Francisco, Denver and the District of Columbia — saw a 21% drop in homicides and an 11% decrease in violent crime.
The data is compiled by voluntary submissions from local police departments. The FBI said it received statistics from 14,809 of 19,311 law enforcement agencies in the country.
The quarterly update comes a week after the FBI released its annual Crime in the Nation report for 2023 that revealed public safety is improving from the pandemic-era crime spike.
The agency reported a nearly 12% decline in homicides throughout the country last year.
But analysts for some outside groups, such as police advocacy organization Law Enforcement Legal Defense Fund, criticized the FBI data for being incomplete.
Sean Kennedy, the defense fund’s policy director, said the FBI’s data had 27 uncounted killings in Baltimore, 50 uncounted killings from Dallas and 118 uncounted homicides from Chicago that were included in a separate dataset from the Major Cities Chiefs Association’s data.
Mr. Kennedy said the discrepancies are borne from local departments not reviewing their data thoroughly enough, and FBI statisticians not following up with local police when they spot abnormalities in the submissions.
The FBI said that discrepancies may be attributed to how different crimes are defined in each state.
• Matt Delaney can be reached at mdelaney@washingtontimes.com.
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