WASHINGTON — Crime, including serious violent incidents like murder and rape, declined nationwide from 2022 to 2023, according to new data released Monday by the FBI.
Violent crime declined by about 3% between 2022 and 2023, and property crime saw a similar decline of 2.4%, the FBI reported in its annual “Summary of Crime in the Nation.” The most serious crimes declined significantly: Murder and manslaughter declined by about 11.6% — the largest annual decline in two decades — while rape declined by about 9.4%.
Preliminary figures showed that crime numbers in 2024 were also down earlier this year, continuing a trend of declining crime as America emerged from the pandemic.
Among property crimes, burglaries decreased by about 7.6%. Motor vehicle thefts, however, increased by about 12.6% between 2022 and 2023. Reported shoplifting incidents also increased: from 999,394 in 2022 to 1,149,336 in 2023, which is about the same level of incidents reported in 2019, before the pandemic. (Store closures and safety measures related to COVID-19 likely reduced shoplifting in 2020 and 2021, and may have also affected incidents in 2022.)
Public perception of crime is often out of step with the facts, especially in the age of social media, easy digital communication between neighbors and video doorbells, where Americans may be more aware of individual crimes than they might have been in the past.
But the violent crime rate declined from 2022 to 2023, from 377.1 violent crimes per 100,000 people in 2022 to 363.8 violent crimes per 100,000 people in 2023, according to new FBI data.
As part of his 2024 campaign, former President Donald Trump tried to make it appear that the United States was experiencing a crime wave. During his debate with Kamala Harris, he called the FBI’s previous figures a “fraud,” saying that some cities were not included. But the FBI does account for information gaps in its estimates. The bureau noted that its 2023 data includes full-year figures from “every municipal agency with a population of one million or more.”
In total, the FBI’s National Incident-Based Reporting System (NIBRS) collected information from 700 more agencies in 2023 than in 2022. The total population covered by the report is more than 315 million people, or 94.3% of the country.
