Maybe the Murder Rate Levelled Off This Year?
In February, out of concern that the US is experiencing a new crime wave, I blogged about a data set Open Phil assembled on crime in major American cities. In comparison with the FBI’s widely cited national totals, our data covered far less territory—18 cities for which we found daily incident data—but did better in the time dimension, with higher resolution and more up-to-date counts. We could compute daily totals, and from data sets that for many cities are almost literally up-to-the-minute.
Some places that have recently made national crime news also appear in our data, including Baltimore, Chicago, St. Louis, and Washington, DC. Within our geographic scope, we gain a better view into the latest trends than we can get from the FBI’s annual totals, which appear with a long lag.
Indeed the FBI will probably release its 2015 crime totals in the next few days, which may stoke discussion about crime in the US. [Update: it just did].
In this post, I update all the graphs presented in the earlier one, which I suggest you read first. These updates generate predictions about what the FBI will announce, and perhaps point to one trend that it won’t yet discern.
With 8 more months of data on these 18 cities, plus the addition of New York for 2006–15, the main updates on per-capita crime rates are:
- On a population-weighted basis, the hints in the old post of decline at the end of 2015, in violent crime in general and homicide in particular, have faded—or at least have been pushed forward in time.
- Instead, after the homicide rise of late 2014 and 2015—which indeed was one of the largest increases in modern times—the homicide trend has flattened.
- Violent crime rose slowly, as it has since mid-2014. It remains low historically, down roughly a third since 2001.
- Property crime (burglary, theft, arson) continues to sink like a stone.
If our data capture national trends (which is far from certain), then the FBI will soon report that the 2015 homicide rate rose a lot from 2014, that violent crime rose a little bit, that property crime fell, and that total crime, which is dominated in sheer quantity by property crime, also fell. [Update: these look right.]
Here are the Open Phil graphs, updated through a few weeks ago and starting with homicide (data and code here):
