FBI reports decrease in violent crime in first quarter of 2024

The FBI’s Uniform Crime Report, released on Monday, showed a 15 percent decrease in reported violent crimes nationwide in the first quarter of this year compared to the first quarter of 2023. Reported homicide rates also decreased more than 26 percent from January to March of this year compared to the same period last year.

U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland said on Monday that the decrease in the murder rate was not an abstract number. Rather, he said it represented lives saved—people who could continue seeing their children grow up while they continued to work toward their dreams and contribute to their communities.

What sort of decreases or increases took place for other crimes? Authorities nationwide saw an almost 26 percent decrease in reported rapes and a nearly 18 percent decrease in robberies, according to the FBI’s report. Instances of reported aggravated assaults decreased by more than 12 percent, and property crimes decreased by roughly 15 percent.

Are these numbers reliable? The FBI described the numbers as preliminary and said it had assembled them from nationwide agency reports that included at least two common months of data from this past quarter and last year’s first quarter. Data analyst and co-founder of analytics firm AH Datalytics Jeff Asher said in an online blog post that he agreed that crime rates had likely decreased but cautioned that the numbers remained subject to change.

Dig deeper: Read Carolina Lumetta’s report in WORLD Magazine earlier this year about how Washington, D.C., has seen a spike in homicides and car thefts and how authorities are trying to crack down on such activity.