Jeff Asher
New Orleans, New York
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Articles by Jeff Asher
Crime Has Continued to Drop in the US in 2026
We are entering the final stretch of 2026 and this year’s national crime trends are fairly close to decided. With that in mind, I thought it’d be worthwhile to sum up where things stand. There is a fair amount of uncertainty as to just how much crime will have fallen in the FBI’s crime report published sometime next August-ish, but the direction of crim…
What Data Can’t Tell Us
Gaps in the knowledge base on women and firearms Crime data questions are typically much easier to ask than to answer. We know how many NFL games were played last season, how many jobs the U.S. economy created last month and the average price of gas in every county in the United States yesterday. Writing about trends in women’s gun deaths and, specifically, domestic violence, seems like it should be straightforward from a data perspective.
Hope in the time of uncertainty: Can the Saints bring the magic back to the Superdome?
Steve Gleason after blocking a Falcons punt during the Saints' first game back in the Superdome after Hurricane Katrina. Photo by Alex Brandon / The AP I was talking to my dad about the Saints back in the dark days of the 2024 season. Games were miserable, opposing fans were appearing in the Dome in droves, and the future was bleaker than it had been in decades. I told Dad I was thinking of giving up my season tickets. Dad rolled his eyes. “The tickets aren’t for you,” he told me.
When Will The US Murder Rate Catch European Rates?
The US had the largest one-year drop in murder ever recorded in 2025. That followed the largest one-year drop in murder ever recorded in 2024. That followed the largest one-year drop in murder ever recorded in 2023. The US probably will not have the largest one year drop in murder ever recorded in 2026, but it could very well come in second. As a result, the United States is set to record by far the lowest murder rate ever recorded here in 2026.
The FBI Reports That Murder Officially Fell At The Fastest Pace Ever Recorded in 2025
In a bit of a surprise, the FBI released its annual report this Friday afternoon covering crime in 2025. This report provides the first formal estimates of how much crime there was in the United States last year. The FBI estimates that murder fell 18 percent in 2025 compared to 2024. There was an estimated 9 percent drop in overall violent crime and a 12 percent drop in overall property crime. Thanks for reading Jeff-alytics! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.
The 2026 US Murder Rate Will Be By Far The Lowest Ever Recorded
There is one critical lesson that every intelligence analyst learns — put the Bottom Line Up Front (BLUF). With that in mind, the BLUF of this piece is that the 2026 US murder rate will likely be incredibly low (at least compared to US recorded history). Or maybe the BLUF should be that there will be around 10,000 fewer murder victims in the United States this year than there were in each of 2020, 2021 and 2022.
Murders in 2025 Were Likely Solved at the Highest Rate This Century
One of the cool new features on our newly released Crime Index is the ability to visualize changing clearance rates (along with crime) as they change. With a few button clicks you can see the US murder clearance rate trend for the last few years. As you can see, murder clearances were right around 60 percent pre-COVID, fell to around 50 percent in 2021 and 2022 before rebounding steadily through the end of 2025.
2026 Will Likely Have The Lowest US Murder Rate Ever Recorded
Yes, it’s late May and there are still more than seven full months remaining in 2026, but there has been enough data collected on this year to say that this year will likely set a new record for lowest murder rate ever recorded by the FBI when their Crime in the Nation report comes out sometime next summer or fall. Thanks for reading Jeff-alytics! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.
Reported Hate Crimes Likely Fell in 2025
The FBI’s switch to monthly reporting means that we don’t have to wait nine months to analyze our nation’s crime trends. So, while the FBI will put out a formal report on hate crimes, the monthly data gives us sufficient evidence so far to say with decent confidence that reported hate crimes in the United States are falling. I’ll reiterate the disclaimer though that this assessment is based on monthly reporting that isn’t all there just yet.
Jeff Asher (@jeffasher.bsky.social)
This is a heavily interactive web application, and JavaScript is required. Simple HTML interfaces are possible, but that is not what this is. Post Jeff Asher jeffasher.bsky.social did:plc:rlq5zaxzxyusk3xsuhkyapxh Philadelphia reported 39 murders through April which is the fewest reported there since 1963. New York City reported 75 murders through April 26 which is on track to be the fewest murders through April ever reported (previous low was 86 in 2018). 2026-05-01T12:51:00.362Z
How Research Is Reshaping Criminal Justice Policy With Jennifer Doleac
Today, I’m talking with my friend Jennifer Doleac, Executive Vice President of Criminal Justice at Arnold Ventures, about how research makes better choices in criminal justice policy possible. This is very evident in her new book (just out now!) called ‘The Science of Second Chances‘ which I’d highly recommend as an engaging, approachable read on a critical topic.
Is Murder Falling Because of Improved Trauma Care?
Why it isn't quite so cut and dry. My first writing for a national audience was in the Fall of 2015 with FiveThirtyEight (RIP). My first piece there was about police department open data, but my second piece was titled Murder Rates Don’t Tell Us Everything About Gun Violence. Thanks for reading Jeff-alytics! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.
Why Most Dangerous/Safest Cities Rankings Are Bunk
New Orleans is the most dangerous city in the United States, at least that's what you'll hear if you ask Wallet Hub. The app that “helps you make the most of your money” came out with a list of places where you can feel the safest with your money. Thanks for reading Jeff-alytics! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work. I often find lists like this are overly complicated, prone towards conflating data reporting errors with “safety”, and fail to adequately contextualize the data.
Analyzing Saturday Night Live With Data
“At first it was good and very hip. And then it got bad, but the show was still hip, so even though it was bad people would still talk about it as though it was good. Then it got good again, but it wasn’t hip. Then it got bad again, now it became hip to talk about how not hip it was…And then the second season started.” - Martin Short, Season 22. This is the 180th newsletter I have written since starting this Substack in late 2022.
2025 Year in Review: A Remarkable Drop In Crime
The number of crimes reported to law enforcement agencies almost certainly fell at a historic clip in 2025 led by the largest one-year drop in murder ever recorded — the third straight year setting a new record — and sizable drops in reported violent and property crime. This assessment will not be confirmed until the FBI releases formal estimates for 2025 sometime in the second half of next year, but it is based on a variety of sources all saying the same thing.
Perceptions of Crime Are Shifting
Gallup released its annual poll gauging how people perceive crime — both locally and nationally. I’ve written about both perceptions of crime broadly and Gallup’s annual poll, and I created a podcast designed to discuss the perceptions issue specifically (which you should listen to), so sufficient to say that I think it’s important to try and make perceptions of crime match reality. Crime — and especially murder — is falling in the United States in 2025 just as it did in 2024 and 2023.
Cities can't find enough cops. Here's what to do about it.
Two years ago, the New Orleans Police Department (NOPD) was reaching a breaking point. It had lost nearly one-fifth of its officers since before the pandemic, and response times ballooned: For nonemergencies, waits more than tripled to three hours. If you dialed 911 because your house had been burglarized in the morning, it could be late in the afternoon before an officer stopped by. Responses to domestic abuse, sex offenses, and other critical calls also bogged down.
Reported Crime May Be Falling At A Historic Rate In The US
Have you listened to last week’s Jeff-alytics podcast yet? It’s a great conversation with Laura Arnold, co-founder of Arnold Ventures so please give it a listen and subscribe for future episodes! Now, onto the newsletter. Murder is falling at the fastest pace ever recorded in 2025. Data from the Real-Time Crime Index shows murder down around 19 percent through August in a sample of more than 550 agencies covering nearly 115 million people nationwide.
Guest column: Data shows why National Guard is not needed in New Orleans
Sending the National Guard to New Orleans to fix crime here is a bad idea that denies the commendable progress that the city has made in lowering crime over the past three years, would hurt local businesses and would further strain the service of the men and women who must drop their lives for an open-ended mission with no clearly defined purpose for which they have no training.
Re-Evaluating Washington DC's Crime Trends
Have you listened to the first episode of the Jeff-alytics podcast with Michael Lewis yet? It’s fun and entertaining so check it out on Spotify, Apple, Amazon, I Heart, or wherever you get your podcast! Be sure to subscribe to catch next week’s chat with Laura Arnold of Arnold Ventures when it comes out. Now onto this week’s newsletter. I have four small kids at home, so I get asked a LOT of questions over the course of any given day.
The FBI Can Now Collect Non-Fatal Shooting Data
Did you read the FBI Criminal Justice Information Services Division Uniform Crime Reporting Program 2025.0 National Incident-Based Reporting System User Manual redline report from June 2025? I bet you did, but on the off chance that you didn’t I’m going to highlight the big news. Thanks for reading Jeff-alytics! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work. This document outlines the changes that are coming to the FBI’s National Incident-Based Reporting System (NIBRS).
The FBI Will Likely Report The Lowest Murder Rate Ever Recorded In 2025
The FBI will likely report the lowest murder rate it has ever recorded when the Reported Crime in the US for 2025 comes out in the second half of 2026. Murder has only been reliably estimated murder nationally since 1960, but reaching the lowest level ever recorded just 5 years after the largest one-year increase on record would be quite remarkable.
Contextualizing Chicago's Enormous Drop in Shootings
Chicago has experienced a remarkable drop in gun violence so far in 2025 though the aggregate number — more than 1,200 shooting victims as of this writing — highlights the scale of continued trauma for far too many Americans. Yet it's also important to recognize the degree of the decline, including the likelihood that Chicago has seen fewer shootings victims so far this year than any year since the mid-1960s.
Evaluating Crime Reporting in Washington, DC
My recent piece on DC got a lot of attention for some reason and I assume it’s because people enjoy reading mundane assessments of crime in random US cities. I’m really excited to put up huge numbers on a future assessment of Tulsa’s crime trends! Joking aside, one of the issues raised by President Trump and many others in the comments centers around the accusations in this piece from the local NBC affiliate published last month.
Opinion | Trump's crackdown on crime in D.C. will only make things worse Original
President Donald Trump’s Monday press conference painted a gruesome picture of a crime-ridden Washington, D.C., as he ordered the National Guard deployed in the city and laid out his plans to “rescue our nation’s capitol from crime, bloodshed, bedlam and squalor.” But official data gives us a much different picture. Crime in D.C. has fallen steadily since peaking in 2023, with murder down 34% so far this year compared with the same time frame in 2023.
Assessing DC's Violent Crime Trends
To paraphrase Bart Simpson, Washington DC’s violent crime data and trends make it a land of many contrasts. As such, the theme of this post on DC’s violent crime trends is that multiple things are true. Thanks for reading Jeff-alytics! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work. DC’s publicly available crime data is mostly good with the city publishing some innovative datasets. DC has incident-level crime data available going back almost 15 years.
Murder Officially Plunged in 2024
The FBI released its report on crime in the United States for 2024 today showing a 14.9 percent decline in murder with 4.4 percent and 8.1 percent drops in overall violent and property crime respectively. The nation’s murder rate for 2024 was down 26 percent from 2020’s figure and roughly even — slightly lower, actually — relative to where it stood pre-pandemic. The nation’s reported violent and property crime rates stood at the lowest levels since the 1960s in 2024.
Assessing Crime At Midyear
Crime almost certainly fell considerably in the United States in the first six months of 2025. The decline in crime that began in 2023 and picked up steam in 2024 has accelerated even faster so far in 2025. Both violent and property crime likely fell with large drops in both murder and motor vehicle theft leading the way. Thanks for reading Jeff-alytics! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work. The national decline in murder stands out due to extraordinary drops in many cities.
Carjackings Continue to Fall (A Lot)
All indications are that carjackings rose a ton in 2020 and 2021. They’re a bit hard to measure because carjackings were not officially tracked until recently, but they have been unofficially tracked in a lot of places making it possible to tease out short and medium-term trends. Thanks for reading Jeff-alytics! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work. Take a look at Chicago, for example.
It's Not Just Murder That's Likely At Historic Lows
Early crime data for 2025 — when considered in context of the nation’s crime trends in 2023 and 2024 — points to new historic lows being reached this year. The available data from 2024 and the first third of of 2025 suggests a strong possibility that the United States will report the lowest murder rate ever recorded, the lowest property rate ever recorded, and the lowest violent crime rate since 1968. Let me explain.
Why I Think Murder Is Plunging
Murder rose at the fastest rate ever recorded in 2020 and largely stayed at that elevated level in 2021 and 2022. Since then, however, murder has been falling at the fastest rate ever recorded. It fell 12 percent in 2023 according to data from the FBI and it likely fell even faster in 2024 according to a variety of sources.
How 2025 Could Feature The Lowest US Murder Rate Ever Recorded
The question recently got raised over on Bluesky regarding whether 2025 will feature the lowest murder rate in the US ever recorded. Shockingly, considering how much murder increased in the United States from 2020 to 2022, the answer is a very definitive “it’s plausible!” Thanks for reading Jeff-alytics! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work. Answering this question starts with identifying the previous record low rate.
Crime Is Likely Down An Enormous Amount So Far In 2025
I was a guest on Jerry Ratcliffe’s excellent podcast a few years ago and we talked about a variety of topics surrounding crime data and crime trends. At some point, the discussion turned to use of Year-to-Date to evaluate crime trends and Jerry, very vividly, exclaimed “Oh, I have thoughts about Year-to-Date.” Thanks for reading Jeff-alytics! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.
How Fewer Foreign Passengers Flying To The US Holds Lessons For Analyzing Crime Data
My favorite part about getting older is that sometimes I wake up at 3:30 AM for no reason and can’t fall back asleep. This happened this weekend and by 5:30 or so I had exhausted my usual phone games (Wordle, Quordle, Blossom, Immaculate, Strands, etc). Reading my book about the extinction of the dinosaurs and rewatching the 9th inning of a thrilling Texas baseball win only woke me up more. Thanks for reading Jeff-alytics! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.
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The Disappearing American Bank Robbery
The United States produced more than 1 billion tons of coal in 2003, but by 2023 that figure had fallen to under 600 million tons. Blockbuster had more than 9,000 stores at its peak in 2004, but there is just one last store remaining today. And in 1992 there were 9,540 bank robberies reported to the FBI (this includes all violations of the Federal Bank Robbery and Incidental Crimes Statute).
Predicting The 2025 Crime Trends
Ordinarily, predicting the future of crime trends is a futile exercise which will inherently be proven wrong in just a few short months, and, of course, this post will be no exception. These predictions will be wrong, but trying to look ahead at next year’s crime trends is a good way to take stock of where we currently stand and set expectations for where things *should* go over the next 12 months. Thanks for reading Jeff-alytics! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.
Why the FBI's 2023 Estimates Were Likely Better Than Recent Years
The FBI's revisions to the 2022 estimates have already gotten far more attention than they deserve given there is no impact on our understanding of national crime trenss. But recent demands from Congress ensure even more effort will be expended to understand a quirk of national crime data. Today, therefore, I'd like to dig deeper into a major reason for the national crime estimates for 2020 and 2022 changing (remember, we are ignoring 2021) and examine the evidence of improvement in the 2023 data.
An Overview of US Crime and Policing Trends
The election is next week so I thought it might be useful to create a primer of all the major trends on crime and policing that I have been following. These are not the only crime trends, but these are the trends that jump out the most in my opinion. Murder is declining at the fastest rate ever recorded in the United States while violent and property crime remain at the modern low levels experienced for most of the last 10 years.
How The FBI Estimates Missing Data And Why You Should Keep Ignoring 2021
Last week I wrote about how revisions are normal (though the revisions in 2022 and 2023 were abnormally large for unknown reasons) and that the revisions to 2021's estimates were substantially larger than the ones to 2022. Since then I’ve been thinking about one of my favorite Simpsons exchanges. In it, Springfield has added a second area code and Homer is mad that they got no warning about the change.
The 2021 Estimates Aren't Suddenly Reliable
I want to address two points that have popped up this week regarding crime data. First, the 2021 estimates were not reliable and your understanding of whether “crime is rising or falling” should not rely on them. Thanks for reading Jeff-alytics! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work. The FBI publishes estimates each year. They’re estimates because not every agency reports data every year.
Hate Crime Data is Still a Mess but Anti-Jewish Hate Crime Likely Rose in 2023
The FBI’s hate crimes data is a mess. I’ve talked about it severaltimes, and a paragraph from last year’s piece about hate crimes gets to the crux of the issue: Much of the problem with hate crimes data is that what gets reported is up to the agencies. What constitutes a murder or a motor vehicle theft is clearly defined by the FBI and relates almost entirely to the offense, but hate crimes require a law enforcement agency to deduce the offender’s motive.
How 'Human Error' Likely Increased the Reported US Violent Crime Rate in 2023
Did violent crime rise or fall in California in 2023? The FBI that there were 203,749 violent crimes in California in 2023, up from 196,252 in 2022. That’s 7,497 more reported violent crimes last year, good for a 3.8 percent increase meaning that as long as the next sentence doesn’t start with ‘but’ this will be my shortest newsletter yet. Thanks for reading Jeff-alytics! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work. But it’s not quite that simple for one main reason: Oakland.
Newsletter: Harris Backed Pistol Ban as San Francisco DA
This week, we broke a major story about Kamala Harris’s record on gun control. As San Francisco District Attorney, she was one of a few city officials to support a total ban on handguns for nearly all residents. As I explain in a members’ piece, that support raises all sorts of questions. About her own handgun ownership. About her change of mind on confiscation. About how all of that will impact the election.
Murder Fell At The Fastest Pace Ever Recorded In 2023
The FBI released its annual Crime in the United States estimates for 2023 today showing an 11.6 percent decline in murder, a 3 decline in violent crime, and a 2.4 decline in property crime nationally last year. The FBI’s 2023 report is based on reporting from 94.3 percent of the US population. Thanks for reading Jeff-alytics! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work. The murder decline is the largest one-year decline ever recorded, besting a 9.1 percent decline in 1996.
Newsletter: The 2024 Race Solidifies
We saw some significant developments in the 2024 presidential election this week. Trump was targetted by another assassin, who, thankfully, didn’t get as far as the first. Harris did a longer interview on gun policy, where she doubled down on what she’s been saying. Then we got some polling that showed a bit of movement on guns but also confirmed voters aren’t that interested in the topic. Contributing Writer Jake Fogleman wrote about that trend in an analysis piece.
The National Crime Victimization Survey 2023 Is Out
The Bureau of Justice Statistics released its annual National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS) for 2023 yesterday which marks the start of a series of crime data releases. NCVS and the FBI’s Uniform Crime Report (UCR) each form one half of the nation’s crime measurement systems. They’re usually in agreement, but UCR showed a decent sized drop in violent crime in violent crime in 2022 while NCVS pointed to a massive increase that year.
The Real-Time Crime Index Shows Declining Crime in 2024
The Real-Time Crime Index is a collection of monthly crime data from over 300 agencies representing more than 75 million people nationwide. As I wrote about yesterday, viewing data from a sample of this size allows for an accurate assessment of crime trends as they occur.
The Real-Time Crime Index Is Live!
The Real-Time Crime Index (or RTCI for short) launches today at https://www.realtimecrimeindex.com! The RTCI presents a new way of looking at crime data by collecting current crime data from hundreds of law enforcement agencies nationwide to present national crime trends as never seen before: as they develop. Thanks for reading Jeff-alytics! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work. You remember the awe you felt when scientists released the first photograph of a black hole?
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