A little while back the FBI modified its crime dashboard to show monthly figures instead of annual ones. Here's what it looks like:
SRS is the old FBI crime reporting system. A decade ago they rolled out a new system called NIBRS. Over time, more and more police departments adopted NIBRS, and in 2021 the FBI finally switched to NIBRS only. It was a disaster. Not enough departments had adopted NIBRS to make it reliable, so in 2022 they once again began accepting crime reports in both formats.¹
Now that we have monthly data, we can see an oddity: in the SRS era the crime count doubles every December. During the transition era the spike was reduced as fewer departments used SRS. Finally, in the modern era the spikes go away completely even in the years when SRS data was being accepted.
What's going on? The spikes are obviously some kind of reporting artifact, but does that mean all the monthly figures are unreliable—too high in December and too low the rest of the year? And why did they go away in 2021? If the monthly figures aren't reliable, why bother even showing them?
And here's another thing: the figures for violent crime don't match the figures you get by adding the four sub-crimes (murder, rape, robbery, and aggravated assault). Not by a mile.
And yet more: the FBI now has figures for lots of very specific crimes. But they're useless because only NIBRS includes this stuff, so everything is shown rising substantially as NIBRS adoption spreads. The numbers literally mean nothing.
What's going on with the FBI's data boffins? Can we trust any of their public facing numbers these days?
¹This is why crime data for 2021 is unreliable.
" What's going on with the FBI's data boffins? Can we trust any of their public facing numbers these days? "
Music to Trump's ears
While NIBRS is mandatory, I betcha that training and reliability lag, with some states collecting/collating data, some states asking each district/county report on its own as it will, with little oversight. GIGO.
The FBI page still says, “Agencies participate voluntarily”. But this is on the page that comes back from a Google search on ‘NIBRS’, which doesn’t appear to have been updated since 2022. It also states that SRS is discontinued. I wish KD had included a link to the source for his data and apparently newer information.
Think you've got the chart partially mislabeled.
Of course you need to get information from the FBI about this, but the disappearance of the spike combined with a higher level otherwise in the latest group suggests that some districts were not actually reporting monthly, but reporting everything in December. How do yearly totals in the groups compare?
If this guess is correct, it does mean that the monthly numbers are inaccurate, unless the districts which report everything in December can be separated. This would appear to be easy to do, but the FBI probably would not want to report two different kinds of districts in this way.
Yeah Mr. Drum. I think a lot of the data you use to make charts and comment is unreliable. Just like the polls!
Anyway, Ezra Klein has a take on crime which you probably read already. I think their take on disorder really undermines the crime is down narrative in which you find consolation. People see and feel this disorder. I don’t think the political class can affect it; especially those in DC, but it would help if we stopped making excuses for criminals.
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/18/opinion/ezra-klein-podcast-charles-fain-lehman.html
The police’s strategy is: You’ll be allowed to sell drugs here, and we’ll concentrate the problems. They think that this will be a solution to the problems of the rest of the city.
But actually what you end up doing, in my experience, is you create concentrated dysfunction, and so you get economies of scale of dysfunction. Having a couple of guys doing drugs in a place is not great, but having a hundred guys doing drugs in a place is how you get a drug market. And a drug market is way more efficient. A drug market is providing a greater variety of services. A drug market is a magnet, and the magnet draws more people in.
This part is the fault of democrats, if you buy the argument.
And I do think that there is an ideological component there when you talk about “How do governments think about tolerance?” — particularly over the past five years but really waxing and waning in American civic life — which says: These problems — the problem of drug addiction, the problem of homelessness, the problem of dysfunctional behaviors, serious mental illness — are intractable and, in fact, it is wrong to try to change them, that it infringes upon the rights of the individual to try to do something about this, that the best we can possibly hope to do for people who are living profoundly dysfunctional lives is make them comfortable and hope that they will choose to change on their own.
This is bad… it should not be tolerated. A fight is disorder. The gunfire is contemptible.
Three people were killed and eight were injured in Holmes County, Mississippi, early Saturday when at least two people opened fire into a group of several hundred celebrating a school's homecoming football win at an outdoor trail after the game ended, authorities say.
The shooting at the trail was after homecoming for Holmes County Consolidated Schools, CBS affiliate WJTV reported. Anywhere from 200 to 300 people were on the trail celebrating, and the gunfire sent them fleeing, Sheriff Willie March said in a phone interview to the Associated Press. The gunfire was proceeded by a fight between some of the men at the celebration, but deputies hadn't yet learned what sparked the fight, March said.
The obvious answer is to entirely end drug prohibition.
Given the prevalence of drug use, it seems like prohibition doesn’t really exist. that one direction guy got all spun up and then jumped off a balcony. So I’m not sure that’s the answer to disorder. Responsible drug users, like responsible gun owners, are in short supply!
Prohibition has clearly failed, but it still exists. How many people are in jail for drug crimes (NOT "drug related crimes" but actual drug crimes such as possession, trafficking, and production)?
The data from places and times where drug prohibition doesn't exist says that responsible drug users are quite common. Also recall that marijuana is still illegal federally and in many states; it is by far the most widely used illegal drug, and the great majority of users are quite responsible and always have been.
So you’re saying Hamsterdam is not going to work the way it was hoped?
It looks to me like the FBI has an elevated T wave. They should see a cardiologist right away before it develops into a more dangerous arrhythmia.