Turn Off The News, Crime Is Actually Down [Data Visualization]

If you’ve watched the news recently, you’ve probably seen plenty of crime-related stories. If you watch it habitually, you’ve probably come to the conclusion that there is an epidemic of crime. It’s good for clicks and capturing people’s short-term attention spans.

However, the reality is a little different.

So I figured I’d quickly throw together some data from the UCR (Federal Bureau of Investigation Uniform Crime Reporting Program Data) about the overall crime statistics within the United States.

Overall Crime Trends (Crime Rate)

The data goes from 1990 to 2014 (later years aren’t yet fully available). The first image is from 1990 to 2001, then the second shows 2002-2014. For a detailed description of the data sources and intricacies, head on over to the FBI details page.

As you can pretty evidently tell from these images, the overall rates of crime have been steadily declining since 1991. Property crime being the most notable decline, being cut practically in half. But the violent crime rate has also steadily decreased over the years, along with all the other individualized crime rates.

(Click on the images to view full size)

What About Total Violent And Property Crime?

What does the crime rate matter? The population is rising.

Well, even with the population rising, the total property crime and total violent crime are decreasing.

Well, What About The Different Types Of Crime?

Seeing a trend yet?

If not, we can further look at the individual crime totals.

Even when considering the different types of federal crimes, we see a decrease. The overall rate of decrease is different depending on the type of crime, but they are all decreasing over this time period.