Preliminary Semiannual Uniform Crime Reports

The FBI released the Preliminary Semiannual Uniform Crime Report in late January. See the press release. For several years now, I have been comparing the one-year changes in California to the rest of the country for cities over 100,000, the only data released that lets us compare by state. See this post two years ago and this post four years ago.

The latest data are consistent with the overall trend, i.e., California is not sharing proportionately in the national drop in crime.

For cities over 100,000 in population, I calculate that property crime dropped 4.1% from Jan-Jun 2018 to the same six months in 2019 in all other jurisdictions and dropped 2.0% in California. For violent crime the trend has been that there is less of a difference, and this year California had a slightly higher drop, 3.0% versus 2.2% for the rest of the country. Last year it was the other way around, with California having a significantly lower drop in violent crimes. See this post from last May.

The full report comes out in the fall. For earlier comparisons based on full-report data, see this post from 2018.