Highlights
An early look at reported crime data for 2025 from the FBI. Numbers from the USDOJ’s National Crime Victimization Survey are included for comparison purposes.
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Crime stats don’t lie, but they don’t tell the whole truth either. Anyone can make any claim they want about crime using FBI or National Crime Victimization Survey data.
The FBI measures reported crime. The public experiences total crime.
Article
The data below from the FBI takes a first look at reported crime for 2025. The FBI is recording 1,119,768 violent crimes, down 9.3 percent. There are 5,245,768 property crimes, down 12.4 percent.
I include data from the USDOJ’s National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS) from the Bureau of Justice Statistics for comparison purposes. The NCVS recorded 6,671,640 violent victimizations in 2024. The NCVS reported 13,069,560 property crimes in 2024.
Yes, there is a huge difference between the numbers reported when comparing FBI data with the 50-year-old National Crime Victimization Survey, which is why so many criminologists advocated for the survey: they understood that FBI numbers (or reported crimes) were inadequate for understanding criminality.
The NCVS has reported a dramatic increase in rates of violent crime, see below.
The FBI’s new National Incident-Based Reporting System (NIBRS) now covers more than 15,000 of 18,000 law enforcement agencies. The NIBRS system can record up to 10 crimes per incident.
Under the older FBI Summary Reporting System, only the most serious offense in an incident was counted in national totals. That policy of offering only the most serious crime continues for national reports.
NIBRS captures substantially more detail, including multiple offenses per incident, but only the most serious crimes are captured for this report. The NIBRS system and additional crimes per incident, however, are used for FBI special reports.
Note that preliminary FBI reports are usually an undercount of crime. Many law enforcement agencies are late in reporting their crime data. The official FBI report for 2025 will be released later this year.
The Majority Of Crime Is Not Reported To Law Enforcement
There are a wide array of crimes, especially property crimes, that may not be included in FBI statistics. There are 120 million porch package thefts in the US. Searches for “stolen package” spike every December, according to Google Trends. The survey indicated that there are far more porch-pirate thefts than the total number of property crimes reported to the FBI. The financial toll of these thefts is $16 billion. Just note that the methodology used in the porch package theft report is dramatically different than what’s used by the FBI.
The majority of all crime is not reported to law enforcement. Approximately 30 percent of property crimes are reported, and property crime makes up approximately 70 percent of all crime. About half of violent crimes are reported, according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics.
74 percent of violent victimizations against juveniles were not reported to the police, and juvenile crime seems to be growing in some cities. For identity theft, roughly 7 percent of incidents were reported per the Bureau of Justice Statistics. Thirteen percent of sexual assaults are reported to law enforcement in urban areas, per the Bureau of Justice Statistics.
About 12,000 hate crime incidents were reported to the FBI, and approximately 250,000 yearly hate crime incidents were recorded by the Bureau of Justice Statistics National Crime Victimization Survey in 2023. If you are making policy, you rely on the largest number possible.
National Crime Victimization Survey
Using crimes reported to law enforcement as a gauge of all crimes in America is filled with methodological pitfalls, which is why I rely on the USDOJ’s National Crime Victimization Survey from the Bureau of Justice Statistics, which records all crime (with some exceptions, i.e., it surveys people over the age of 12, business crimes are not included, homicides are not counted-you can’t interview dead people).
The NCVS is what the US Department of Justice and US Census call “the nation’s primary source of information on criminal victimization.”
The National Crime Victimization Survey recorded a record 44 percent increase in violent victimization rates in 2022, and rates have remained the same per the USDOJ’s Bureau of Justice Statistics in 2023 and 2024 (last full report). The FBI reported decreased crime in 2024.
These estimates are based on data submitted by more than 17,000 agencies, covering 96% of the population, for 2025. This increased from 16,675 agencies in 2024. More than 15,000 agencies submitted data via the National Incident-Based Reporting System (NIBRS) for 2025. These agencies cover nearly 90% of the population. Nearly 500 more agencies reported via NIBRS in 2025 compared to 2024. The following data are considered preliminary and are subject to change prior to the release of “Reported Crimes in the Nation, 2025,” which will be published on the FBI’s Crime Data Explorer website later this year. Data as of April 2, 2026
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