The FBI releases crime stats months after the fact. This new crime tracker is trying to be more timely – and the FBI is too

(CNN) — In September 2024, the FBI released data with some retroactively good news: Violent crime declined across the US in 2023.

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

And what about crime in the months since, a period that includes two attempted assassinations against a presidential candidate, multiple destructive hurricanes and the annual summer rise in mass shootings?

The FBI hasn’t released that data. And it won’t for several more months, as it works to collect and double-check data from thousands of law enforcement agencies.

For crime experts and researchers like Jeff Asher, the delay in getting reliable data from the FBI in a timely manner is a source of major frustration.

“There’s nothing else in American society that I can think of, that we’re like, ‘Oh, it’s OK to have a nine-month lag in terms of knowing these trends.’ Inflation, jobs reports, baseball. We expect a fast understanding of the general trend, even if we can argue about what’s causing (them),” he told CNN.

“With crime data, we’re like, ‘It’s OK to wait nine months, then we’ll eventually understand what’s happening.’ We’re making literal life-and-death decisions based on a poor understanding nationally and locally of what’s happening.”

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

The Real-Time Crime Index is one of a number of non-governmental groups – including the Gun Violence Archive and the Live Crime Tracker from NORC at the University of Chicago – trying to bring a sense of urgency and timeliness to the release of crime stats in the US.

The FBI says it is also moving toward timeliness. When asked by CNN about this lag in reporting crime stats, the bureau said it plans to begin releasing crime stats on a monthly basis “in the coming months.”

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

The push to provide more timely data comes amid a presidential election season in which voters commonly list crime as one of their most important issues. Yet the candidates cannot even agree on whether crime is increasing or decreasing – and a murder committed in July won’t be included in official FBI crime stats until well after the election.

As of mid-October, the Real-Time Crime Index included crime data through August, bringing the public vital data months ahead of the FBI. According to their analysis, murders are down 15.9% and violent crime is down 4.1% so far this year compared to the same point last year.

For comparison, the FBI’s latest data, released in late September, shows murders from January to June dropped 23% and violent crime fell 10% compared with the same period in 2023. While the tallies are different, both show a similar trend: Declining murders and violent crimes compared to last year.

For Asher, the hope is the Real-Time Crime Index will help provide a baseline of knowledge so that journalists, researchers and policymakers can better examine the causes of the crime trends and have more substantive debates.

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

FBI is moving to release crime stats monthly

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

There are about 18,000 law enforcement agencies in the US, and many voluntarily submit their data to the state or the FBI through the Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR) Program. The FBI then does significant quality control checks to make sure the data is accurate and reliable before releasing their analysis, but that takes some time, according to Alex Piquero, the former director of the Bureau of Justice Statistics, the Department of Justice’s primary statistical agency.

The FBI explained in its statement that it sets a deadline, generally April 1, for agencies to submit crime data for the prior year. At that point, the FBI performs “quality and completeness checks” to look for errors or other issues. The FBI production of the annual crime stats publication then takes place over months, followed by internal and agency reviews.

The FBI has recently moved to speed up its processes. In September 2020, the bureau began releasing crime data every quarter, saying on its website, “this schedule provides greater timeliness for national crime data releases.”

Further, the FBI told CNN on October 22 it plans to soon release new crime stats every month through its Crime Data Explorer (CDE) site.

“Rather than data being annually refreshed, it will be continuously updated, ensuring transparency in the reporting process,” the bureau said. “This will allow contributing agencies and states to view the data that they have submitted to the FBI and make corrections if needed.”

The site will display “up-to-date trend data,” albeit with a three-month lag to allow states the time to report their crime stats. This crime data “will likely change” over time, but the FBI said it expects the “transparency will add to data quality” because agencies will be able to routinely review and revise the data.

Index hopes to complement FBI data

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

“There’s value in understanding what’s happening fast, and then there’s value in taking a bigger picture, more precise view and applying a more rigorous methodology to your understanding,” Asher said.

The index is funded by a three-year grant from Arnold Ventures, a philanthropy founded by Laura and John Arnold – a former oil company executive and hedge fund founder, respectively – that works to offer evidence-based policy solutions to major issues.

But analyzing policy ideas on criminal justice issues is tricky because of the delay in getting timely, accurate stats from the FBI, according to Jennifer Doleac, the executive vice president of criminal justice at Arnold Ventures.

“If a city tries a new program this year, it’s going to be three, four maybe five years before we’re able to see what the impact of that is over time,” she told CNN. “Certainly researchers but also policymakers want a much faster turnaround than that.”

CNN Chief Law Enforcement and Intelligence Analyst John Miller said the FBI’s refined, historic data is “essential,” but noted that real-time raw data is more useful for a police chief, crime strategist or elected official for spotting trends and adjusting tactics.

“The numbers may not be as precise, but as a form of radar for national crime trends they will be within the margin of error and come with the speed of need,” he said.

The Real-Time Crime Index helps solve one such issue, but Doleac noted how little data there is about other basic parts of the criminal justice system, such as the courts and Department of Corrections.

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

A ‘major contribution’ to the public

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

“They provide a useful pulse, I would argue,” he told CNN. “A pulse is not representative of everybody and every city, but it’s better than nothing, and that’s what I think the value is of that.”

Yet the need for a tool like the Real-Time Crime Index speaks to broader issues with the government’s approach to crime data, he said.

“When people have to do the work that I think the federal government should be doing, that’s a bit of a problem in my mind,” Piquero said.

As of October 2024, the Real-Time Crime Index includes data from about 300 law enforcement agencies covering about 75 million people and about 45% of the country’s murders. While that’s not the entire US, that data set is large enough to make the index a predictor of national crime trends, Asher said.

“Crime statistics are inexact, but sampling agencies in this way is a proven method for accurately measuring trends while waiting for national crime estimates published each year,” the website states in bold.

In the short term, Asher hopes to grow the database to about 500 to 1,000 agencies. He’d also like to include other metrics like clearance rates – a term for the percentage of crimes that police solve by arrest or other means – or carjackings in the database. As for the long term, he said he hoped to pass this tool off to the government to manage.

“We see this as a public good,” Asher said. “There’s no subscription cost. Agencies don’t have to pay to participate. Nobody has to pay to get access to the data. We’d love for this to be government-run in some way, and it’s our hope that we’ll eventually get there.”

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