Crime is down, but what else do the FBI's stats show?

By Justin Fox / Bloomberg Opinion

Crime fell in the U.S. in 2024. This was not exactly news when the Federal Bureau of Investigation disclosed it in its annual crime report last week; the Major Cities Chiefs Association, Real-Time Crime Index and Council on Criminal Justice released data months ago showing almost every category of crime down in 2024 in the cities they track, and they have put out subsequent reports showing continued declines in 2025.

Still, it was nice to see the FBI’s annual report (1) arriving earlier than in past years and (2) again covering more than 95 percent of the U.S. population as it had before a botched switchover to a new reporting system led to a collapse in 2021 in the share of law-enforcement agencies that sent in data. That new National Incident-Based Reporting System (which is up to 87.2 percent population coverage, with about 2,000 mostly smaller agencies still using the old summary reporting system) is also beginning to deliver on its promise of providing much more detailed information about crime in the U.S.

With President Donald Trump portraying crime in Washington, D.C., and other cities as out of control despite the clear downward trend, and Gallup polls through the decades showing most Americans convinced that crime is rising no matter what the statistics say, it’s anybody’s guess what effect these new, more reliable and more detailed numbers will have. Even I am a little dubious of FBI estimates showing violent crime (murder, rape, robbery and aggravated assault) at half-century lows relative to population and property crime possibly lower than it’s ever been. The Bureau of Justice Statistics’ annual Crime Victimization Surveys show marked declines over the past two decades in the share of crimes that respondents say they reported to police, and those are the only crimes the FBI knows about; it even changed the name of its annual release from “Crime in the Nation” to “Reported Crimes in the Nation” this year to reflect this. Also, property offenses have been migrating online, rendering the historical FBI property-crime trio of burglary, larceny-theft and motor vehicle theft less relevant in an age of phishing, catfishing and other digital crime.

The new NIBRS system does make room for digital crime and lots of other offenses. It’s not much good yet for comparisons over time, but the snapshot it offers of crime in 2024 is enlightening. The biggest takeaway — which I’ll get to in a moment — is that crime in the U.S., at least violent crime, is mostly not of the random, impersonal sort that dominates headlines and nightmares but instead usually involves familiar people in familiar places doing terrible things to one another. The most fascinating information I found among the 2024 NIBRS spreadsheets, though, had no obvious takeaway other than: Watch out between midnight and 1 a.m.

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