Crime in the United States

Crime has been recorded in the United States since its founding and has fluctuated significantly over time. Most available data underestimate crime before the 1930s (due to incomplete datasets and other factors), giving the false impression that crime was low in the early 1900s and had a sharp rise after.^[1] Instead, violent crime during the colonial period was likely three times higher than the highest modern rates in the data we have, and crime had been on the decline since colonial times.^[2] Within the better data for crime reporting and recording available starting in the 1930s, crime reached its broad, bulging modern peak between the 1970s and early 1990s. After 1992, crime rates have generally trended downwards each year, with the exceptions of a slight increase in property crimes in 2001 and increases in violent crimes in 2005–2006, 2014–2016 and 2020–2021.^[3] As of July 1, 2024 violent crime was down and homicides were on pace to drop to 2015 levels by the end of the year.^[4][5]

As the Marshall Project notes, “By 2020, almost every law enforcement agency was included in the FBI’s database.” But the new system, which went into effect in 2021, is missing a lot of data. In 2022, 32% of police departments stopped reporting crime data, and another 24% of departments only reported crime data for some months during the year. This results in the omitted data not being counted, leading to an artifically lower crime rate.^[6] Federal data for 2020–2021 and limited data from select U.S. cities collected by the nonpartisan Council on Criminal Justice showed significantly elevated rates of homicide and motor vehicle theft in 2020–2022.^[3][7][8] Although overall crime rates have fallen far below the peak of crime seen in the United States during the late 1980s and early 1990s,^[9][10] the homicide rate in the U.S. has remained high, relative to other "high income"/developed nations, with eight major U.S. cities ranked among the 50 cities with the highest homicide rate in the world in 2022. The aggregate cost of crime in the United States is significant, with an estimated value of $4.9 trillion reported in 2021.^[11] Data from the first half of 2023^[update], from government and private sector sources show that the murder rate has dropped, as much as 12% in as many as 90 cities across the United States.^[12] The drop in homicide rates is not uniform across the country however, with some cities such as Memphis, TN, showing an uptick in murder rates.^[12]

The two major sources of national crime data are the Federal Bureau of Investigation's Uniform Crime Reports (which indexes eight types of offenses recorded by law enforcement) and the Bureau of Justice Statistics's National Crime Victimization Surveys (which may cover offenses not reported to police).^[13] In addition to the primary Uniform Crime Report known as Crime in the United States, the FBI publishes annual reports on the status of law enforcement in the United States. The report's definitions of specific crimes are considered standard by many American law enforcement agencies. According to the FBI, index crime in the United States includes violent crime and property crime. Violent crime consists of five criminal offenses: murder and non-negligent manslaughter, rape, robbery, aggravated assault, and gang violence; property crime consists of burglary, larceny, motor vehicle theft, and arson.

The basic aspect of a crime considers the offender, the victim, type of crime, severity and level, and location. These are the basic questions asked by law enforcement when first investigating any situation. This information is formatted into a government record by a police arrest report, also known as an incident report. These forms lay out all the information needed to put the crime in the system and it provides a strong outline for further law enforcement agents to review. Society has a strong misconception about crime rates due to media aspects heightening their fear factor.^[14] The system's crime data fluctuates by crime depending on certain influencing social factors such as economics, the dark figure of crime, population, and geography.^[14]