How does Live Crime Tracker improve on what already exists?
The FBI collects national statistics, but they are only released annually in the fall, reporting on the previous year.
Other timely crime resources either focus on a single type of crime (homicide) or are released monthly. Live Crime Tracker
provides real-time data for more than 50 U.S. cities in eight crime categories, including homicide, burglary, and aggravated
assault. This tracker also includes in-depth city crime profiles, interactive maps, and a daily crime tracker that allows users
to analyze trends over time and compare them across locations.
What are Live Crime Tracker’s limitations?
Live Crime Tracker compiles data shared by local governments, and some of those data are incomplete.
A lot of work goes into providing “live” data from open data portals, but incident-level open data also requires that it is updated over time as errors are identified.
The “live” data shown in the Live Crime Tracker is not necessarily considered the final data and may change over time as cities remove duplicates and belatedly add records on some days.
We update the data shown in the Live Crime Tracker as cities make these changes. We have intentionally exposed
those gaps in data, because encouraging more depth and consistency of data is one of our goals. Timely, accurate, and reliable
data-sharing is a cornerstone of fair and effective policymaking. Find your city’s data source on our Methodology page.
Who is Live Crime Tracker for?
The Live Crime Tracker was developed for a wide audience interested in timely crime data, including the media, researchers, policymakers,
community members, and more. The goal is to highlight emerging trends—good and bad—to help facilitate a faster, better-informed public
safety response.
How did you choose the cities in Live Crime Tracker?
We began by looking for open data from among the 200 largest U.S. cities. After compiling a list of cities with publicly available crime data,
we categorized cities by how frequently their data were updated and the type of data reported. We found that only 50+ cities provide publicly
available crime data at the incident level, with frequent updates and without routine lags of weeks or months. Our hope is that more cities will
meet this standard of reporting, and once they do, we will add them here.
Why is open data valuable?
Open data, specifically incident-level crime data, is critical to enhancing public and stakeholder understanding of risks and harms from crime.
Unlike crime maps (which can exaggerate individual risks) or summary data (which can hide important nuance), open, incident-level data allows the
public to evaluate how crime varies over time and by crime type and assess when risk increases or decreases in a given time of month or year. This
fuller and timelier picture of how and when crime is happening can lead to more informed public policy and safer, thriving communities.
Why do the costs-of-crime matter?
Knowing the costs-of-crime can help policymakers, victim service providers, and the public understand the impact of crime and how much to invest to reduce it.
The costs-of-crime estimates provide additional information beyond what is found in crime counts or crime rates. Costs-of-crime describe the size of the losses in human terms.
They also allow comparisons that are standardized—each city or time being compared is using the same unit of measure, i.e., dollars, so the comparisons are inherently meaningful.
Finally, they allow complex changes in crime to be evaluated (e.g., When some crimes are up and others are down, is that city in that time safe?)
How do we measure the costs-of-crime?
Crime is a complex phenomenon. It is important to understand when crime is more or less severe, but it is difficult to do this in practice.
A common approach is to count how many crimes are felonies and how many are misdemeanors, but these terms do not have broad meaning and provide little guidance when crime goes up in one type of felony and down in another.
Costs-of-crime are typically measured as the costs-of-crime to victims, which is a way of measuring their losses (health care, work, family, etc.).
Counting the costs-of-crime can lead to a clearer understanding of what it means when crime goes up or down and facilitates easy comparisons—between one city over many time periods or across many cities in one time period.
Who should use the costs-of-crime data?
Costs-of-crime data can be used by:
- Journalists reporting on crime trends
- Policymakers deciding on where to deploy scarce resources
- Victim service providers trying to understand the scope of the problems they're trying to solve
- Members of the public who want to understand the toll of crime victimization
What are the limitations of the cost estimates?
Our crime cost estimates use the cost-of-illness method, which tracks victims' physical, mental, and behavioral health treatments
for one year by linking crime reports to health records.
While this is considered the most rigorous approach available, it captures only part of crime's total economic impact.
Notable exclusions from our estimates include:
- Emotional and financial impacts on victims' families and friends
- Community-level costs from crime-related stigma
- Criminal justice system expenses for investigation and prosecution
- Various other indirect costs
Though no method can fully capture all costs-of-crime victimization, the cost-of-illness approach provides the most reliable foundation for estimation currently available.
Why only include cost estimates for four offenses (aggravated assault, robbery, sex offenses, and simple assault)?
Our cost-of-illness methodology only includes crimes that cause direct physical harm.
While data exist on the monetary losses from property crimes, we cannot capture their significant non-economic impacts,
such as the emotional trauma from a home burglary or vehicle theft.
The challenge of valuing human life adds another layer of complexity.
Though regulators use the 'value of a statistical life' for environmental and safety regulations,
this metric isn't appropriate for crime victimization analysis.