CRIME TRENDS RESEARCH

Reliable, timely, and accessible crime data is essential to shaping effective policies, guiding prevention strategies, and informing the public. Yet even with recent improvements, U.S. crime data often falls short, lagging by months, incomplete in coverage, and vulnerable to manipulation and mistrust. Without clear facts, public debate is too often driven by selective statistics and competing narratives, undermining safety, trust, and progress. 

CCJ helps close this information gap, grounding the public discourse on crime trends in facts by producing original data collections analyses.  

Our reports focus on three main areas: national trends, city-level fact sheets, and in-depth examinations of specific offenses. They are based on monthly incident-level data obtained from online portals of city police departments. Incident counts are collected within days of the end of the study period to provide a timely snapshot of crime across the nation. As a result, these figures may and often do differ from data subsequently published by the police departments and from other counts released later by the FBI as part of its national crime reporting program.  

For the most up-to-date information for a specific city, please visit its website.