Last week's FBI compilation showing that violent crime reports went down about 3 percent last year doesn't mean that crime isn’t rising anywhere.
Governing magazine calls it "a fact-check on claims that crime has gone 'through the roof' throughout the U.S. in recent years" It doesn’t show what is happening in 2024. The FBI crime data have always had a lag time, which means information that could help drive decisions about response to crime doesn't reflect real-time problems.
Data analysts have created an open-source tool to close this time lag. The Real-Time Crime Index (RTCI) shows monthly changes in crime numbers from more than 350 agencies, including nearly every one of the 25 largest U.S. cities.
Users can view crimes by month or as a “rolling sum” of the number of offenses in the past 12 months. They can see national trends or trends in communities whose data is included, fewer than are in the FBI count. RTCI's creators are confident it contains enough data to reflect national trends.
RTCI was built by AH Datalytics and launched in September. It was created as a public service, says Jeff Asher, AH Datalytics’ co-founder.
“We were frustrated that the U.S. publishes data on the number of hogs slaughtered each day with a one day lag but national crime stats only annually, 9 months later,” tweeted John Arnold of Arnold Ventures, which supported Asher's team in creating RTCI.
Republican Kentucky Sen. Whitney Westerfield invited Asher to present it to state officials.
"Jails and policing are huge budget line items, and they have huge impact on the immediate population and the next generation of a jurisdiction's population," Westerfield says. Misinformed decisions can do harm, he says. “This index provides an opportunity for policy makers to make a better educated guess."
People from both parties can have knee-jerk reactions to statements about crime rates on cable news or social media, he says. "[Legislators] might be acting on data that is three- or four-year-old criminal justice data when they are making sweeping policy decisions," Westerfield says.
The release of 2023 FBI crime statistics provided a test for RTCI. When we looked at our data from 2023 compared to theirs, we were pretty much spot on,” says the operation's Katie Schwipps. “You might be off by a percentage point here or there, but the overall trends that we’re showing are representative of the national trends.”
Asher's target is to increase the number of participating agencies to 500 or more. There are 800 police departments in the U.S. that serve populations of 50,000 or larger.
RTCI allows users to sort its data set by population size in a way that mirrors FBI data, and trends that show up when this is done also match those in FBI data, says RTCI's Dave Hatten. “Although it’s a drastically smaller size, we’ve been able to prove a proof of concept, that the trends are clear and they track what’s actually happening,” Hatten says.
Any of the data in the RTCI can be downloaded, including the data from participating agencies before AH Datalytics filters it to be compatible with the dashboard. Data are refreshed every 45 days, which includes the time necessary to get every new month of data ready for import.