The News
Crime is one of the biggest national debates that we have the least timely data on. Official crime statistics from the FBI are notoriously slow, while outside efforts to track trends are often incomplete.
A new project, the Real Time Crime Index, that launched today is looking to change the policy conversation by gathering representative data from over 300 state and local agencies and updating them on a six-week lag. It finds murder down 15.7% through June 2024, continuing a post-pandemic trend.
“Crime data is traditionally slow, which leads to misperceptions about trends,” Jeff Asher, a co-founder of AH Datalytics who is overseeing the project, told Semafor. “I wanted to build a system that leverages vast quantities of available data on crime that allows anyone to see the numbers and trends in novel ways without having to wait for final estimates to be published months later.”