Most violent crime rates have fallen back to pre-pandemic levels,” according to a recent headline from the Oregon Capital Chronicle. The article discusses a new report from the Council on Criminal Justice (CCJ), a nonprofit think tank that gathers data from individual law enforcement agencies for its biannual crime trends reports. According to the CCJ report, homicides in 2024 declined by 16% compared to 2023. 

Despite the encouraging news from the report, some caveats exist. The FBI “crime rates” that are typically cited in the media come from the annual Uniform Crime Report (UCR), a longtime system in which the FBI collects crime data from all the law enforcement agencies across the country. The CCJ report contains more recent data than the last UCR, which was released in September, but it is based on just 40 U.S. cities, and not all of those had data available for every type of offense. Among the cities examined, 22 experienced a decline in homicides compared to 2023. Six of them, however, actually experienced an increase. Colorado Springs, for example, saw a 56% jump in homicides.

The headline about “pre-pandemic levels” comes with its own asterisks. While the CCJ study’s 40-city sample saw a 6% overall decline in homicides compared to 2019, that wasn’t true for all cities in the study. In some, homicide had increased since before the pandemic. New York City reported 382 homicides in 2024 compared with 319 in 2019. Washington, D.C., reported 187 in 2024, compared to 166 in 2019.

The news for other violent crimes was similarly mixed. Sexual assault, domestic violence and robbery are now below pre-pandemic levels, but aggravated assaults, gun assaults and carjackings are higher than in 2019. Despite widespread efforts to combat retail theft, shoplifting was 14% higher than in 2023 and 1% higher than 2019, though some experts believe that could be due to increased attention leading to a rise in reporting.  

Crime (and the criminal justice system) continues to be a hot topic in political discourse. While the findings from the CCJ study are promising, time will tell whether the FBI’s next release will show the trend continuing as more jurisdictions report their data. It’s unlikely that all the talk about crime will go away anytime soon, but with public perception of crime not always mirroring reality, it’s important that conversations be based on real data.