Exciting new "Real-Time Crime Index" website officially launched

Regular readers are used to seeing my references to the YTD Murder Comparison from the folks at AH Datalytics.  I am excited to see that these folks now have launched a "Real-Time Crime Index."   Jeff Asher has this new substack post discussing the launch and the tool, and here are excerpts:

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.

The RTCI was built thanks to generous support from Arnold Ventures and incredible hard work from the RTCI team: Dave Hatten, Katie Schwipps, and Oscar Boochever (as well as my co-founder Ben Horwitz and a ton of people who helped advise on data collection, auditing, and visualization).  The goal of this project is to provide this information so that anyone — regardless of their location, expertise in crime data, political persuasion, or policy preferences — can use it to understand crime locally or nationally.

The RTCI currently has data from more than 350 agencies covering over 80 million people though not all of those agencies have available data for every month from January 2017 through June 2024.  The agencies that do have data for every month since 2017 make up the nationwide sample which as of June 2024 has 304 agencies covering over 76 million people with full data in at least one crime category.  The national sample right now covers around 25 percent of the nation’s population and 45 percent of the murders that occur each year.

I’ll do a post tomorrow with much more detail about what the RTCI says about national crime trends and another post — probably next week — going deeper into the methodology behind the RTCI.  Overall, violent crime and property crime are falling in the United States according to the RTCI’s sample of data through June 2024.  Murder was down roughly 16 percent midway through the year, with overall violent and property crime down 5 and 9 percent respectively.  The RTCI also shows that the big property crime decline is being driven by motor vehicle theft falling 17 percent, after rising considerably each year from 2020 through 2023.

But the beauty of the RTCI is that anyone can see the data, the trends, the sourcing, and the methodology to evaluate what’s happening.  All of the current data for every city comes from either agencies themselves or state UCR programs with data received either through publicly available open data or sent to us directly from agencies or state UCR programs.