The FBI releases crime statistics months after the crime. This new crime tracker tries to be more current – and so is the FBI

CNN
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In September 2024, the FBI released data with retroactive good news: violent crime fell across the United States in 2023.

Has this trend continued this year? The FBI's preliminary information says yes – but that data is not final and only includes crimes through the end of June.

And what about crime in the months that followed, which included two assassination attempts against a presidential candidate, several devastating hurricanes and the annual increase in mass shootings over the summer?

The FBI has not released this data. And that will take several more months as it collects and reviews data from thousands of law enforcement agencies.

For crime experts and researchers like Jeff Asher, the delay in getting the FBI on time is a source of great frustration.

“I can't think of anything else in American society where we say, 'Oh, it's OK if we're nine months late on these trends.' Inflation, jobs reports, baseball. We expect a quick understanding of the general trend, even if we can argue about the causes,” he told CNN.

“With crime data, we say, 'It's OK to wait nine months and then eventually we'll understand what's happening.' We are literally making life and death decisions based on an inadequate understanding of what is happening at the national and local levels.”

Now Asher is doing something about it. In September, his company AH Datalytics launched the Real-Time Crime Index, a website that analyzes current crime data from nearly 300 law enforcement agencies to produce a graph showing nationwide crime trends. The site includes data on crime types – murders, robberies, rapes, etc. – as well as breakdowns by city size and state.

The Real-Time Crime Index is one of several non-governmental groups – including the Gun Violence Archive and NORC's Live Crime Tracker at the University of Chicago – trying to bring a sense of urgency and timeliness to the release of crime statistics in the United States.

The FBI says it's also about timeliness. When asked by CNN about this delay in reporting crime statistics, the bureau said it plans to begin releasing monthly crime statistics “in the coming months.”

“This marks the culmination of several years of effort and a significant shift toward providing more timely data to consumers,” the FBI said in a statement.

The push to provide more current data is coming amid a presidential election season in which voters typically cite crime as one of their top issues. Yet the candidates don't even agree on whether crime is increasing or decreasing — and a murder committed in July won't be included in the FBI's official crime statistics until long after the election.

As of mid-October, the real-time crime index included crime data through August, putting the public key data ahead of the FBI by months. According to their analysis, murders are down 15.9% and violent crime is down 4.1% so far this year compared to the same period last year.

By comparison, the FBI's most recent data, released in late September, shows that murders fell 23% and violent crime fell 10% from January to June compared to the same period in 2023. Although the numbers are different, both show a similar trend: decreases in murders and violent crimes compared to the previous year.

Asher hopes the real-time crime index will help provide a knowledge base so journalists, researchers and policymakers can better examine the causes of crime trends and engage in more substantive debates.

“We shouldn’t be having conversations about what the trend is, whether it’s going up or down,” Asher said. “This tool will hopefully provide a basic understanding of the trend so we can have more fruitful conversations.”

The basic explanation for the FBI's delay in providing crime data is that accuracy takes time, experts said.

There are approximately 18,000 law enforcement agencies in the United States, and many voluntarily submit their data to the state or the FBI through the Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR) program. The FBI then conducts extensive quality checks to ensure the data is accurate and reliable before releasing its analysis. But that takes time, according to Alex Piquero, former director of the Bureau of Justice Statistics, the Justice Department's main statistics agency.

The FBI said in its statement that it sets a deadline, typically April 1, for agencies to submit crime data for the previous year. At this point, the FBI conducts “quality and completeness checks” to look for errors or other problems. The FBI's annual release of crime statistics then takes months to produce, followed by internal and regulatory reviews.

The FBI has recently taken steps to speed up its processes. In September 2020, the bureau began releasing crime data quarterly, stating on its website, “This schedule provides greater timeliness in the release of national crime data.”

The FBI also told CNN As of October 22, the company plans to soon release new crime statistics every month through its Crime Data Explorer (CDE) website.

“Instead of updating the data annually, it will be updated continuously to ensure transparency in the reporting process,” the office said. “This will allow contributing agencies and states to view the data they have submitted to the FBI and make corrections as necessary.”

The website displays “current trend data,” but with a three-month lag to give states time to report their crime statistics. This crime data “will likely change over time,” but the FBI expects that “transparency will improve data quality” because authorities will be able to routinely review and revise the data.

Experts in the field of crime statistics have noted some drawbacks to the FBI's focus on accuracy over timeliness. Asher and other members of AH Datalytics told CNN that they view their work as a complement to the FBI's data rather than a replacement.

“It's valuable to quickly understand what's happening, and then it's valuable to take a bigger picture, get a more granular view and use a more rigorous methodology for understanding,” Asher said.

The index is funded by a three-year grant from Arnold Ventures, a charity founded by Laura and John Arnold – a former oil executive and hedge fund founder, respectively – that works to provide evidence-based policy solutions to important problems.

However, according to Jennifer Doleac, executive vice president of criminal justice at Arnold Ventures, analyzing policy ideas on criminal justice issues is difficult because of the delay in receiving timely and accurate statistics from the FBI.

“If a city tries a new program this year, it will take three, four or five years before we can see what impact that has over time,” she told CNN. “Researchers, but also political decision-makers, would certainly like to see a much quicker turnaround.”

John Miller, CNN's chief law enforcement and intelligence analyst, said the FBI's refined, historical data is “essential” but noted that real-time, raw data would be more useful to a police chief, crime strategist or elected official to spot trends and adapt tactics.

“The numbers may not be as precise, but as a kind of radar for national crime trends they will be within the margin of error and delivered at the speed that is necessary,” he said.

The Real-Time Crime Index helps address such a problem, but Doleac noted how little data exists about other fundamental parts of the criminal justice system, such as the courts and the Department of Corrections.

“My team and I are trying to imagine a future where we have more data to guide our efforts, and this is all part of the process of moving in that direction,” she said.

Piquero praised the Real-Time Crime Index as a “great contribution” to the public and said it was “really useful” in providing up-to-date information without significant sacrifice in accuracy.

“They provide a useful stimulus, I would argue,” he told CNN. “One pulse isn’t representative of everyone and every city, but it’s better than nothing, and that’s where I think the value of it lies.”

But the need for a tool like the real-time crime index highlights broader problems in how the government handles crime data, he said.

“If people have to do the work that I think the federal government should do, that’s a bit of a problem to me,” Piquero said.

As of October 2024, the Real-Time Crime Index includes data from approximately 300 law enforcement agencies, covering approximately 75 million people and approximately 45% of the country's homicides. While this doesn't cover the entire U.S., this data set is large enough to make the index a predictor of national crime trends, Asher said.

“Crime statistics are imprecise, but this type of agency sampling is a proven method for accurately measuring trends while awaiting the release of national crime estimates each year,” the website says in bold.

In the short term, Asher hopes to expand the database to about 500 to 1,000 agencies. He also wants to add other metrics such as clearance rates – a term for the percentage of crimes that police solve through arrests or other means – or car thefts to the database. In the long term, he said he hopes to pass this tool on to the government for management.

“We view this as a public good,” Asher said. “There are no subscription costs. Agencies do not have to pay anything to participate. Nobody has to pay to get access to the data. We would love to see this managed by the government in some way and we hope to get there at some point.”