- There is no acceptable level of violence or criminality in any community.

But today's guest says the debate about urban crime and what to do about it is divorced from what the data actually says about crime in American cities.

Here's Ernesto Lopez this week on "Story in the Public Square."

(bright music) (bright music continues) (bright music continues) Hello and welcome to "Story in the Public Square" where storytelling meets public affairs.

I'm Jim Ludes from The Pell Center at Salve Regina University.

- And I'm G. Wayne Miller, also with Salve's Pell Center.

- And our guest this week is Ernesto Lopez, a senior research specialist at the Council on Criminal Justice.

He recently published their midyear study with Bobby Boxerman of the Regional Justice Information Service and Crime Trends in American Cities.

He's joining us today from St.

Louis.

Ernesto, thank you so much for being with us.

- Thank you for having me on.

- And you know, we're having a conversation in this country at least.

We have been for the last several months about violent crime in American cities.

And so we wanted to talk with you about really what does the data say and how does that differ or confirm with what we, with the dialogue that we're having as a nation.

So let's start with the study that the Council on Criminal Justice just released earlier this summer, "Crime Trends in US Cities, The Midyear 2025 Update."

Let's just start really broadly, what is this report surveying?

What's the basis for the data?

And then we'll get to the results in a minute.

- Alright, so this report looks at crime trends in about 40 cities across the US.

We started doing these reports right when the COVID to 19 pandemic began, because in the nation we had an absence of national based crime data.

The FBI historically has taken over a year to publish crime statistics.

And so we wanted to fill that void by getting the most recent data available from the largest cities in the US to try to get us image of what's going on throughout the country.

And since I believe summer of 2020, we've been producing these reports.

- And how does, so you know, you mentioned the sort of nationally maintained crime data sets.

How does the Council on Criminal Justice acquire the data that is included in a study like this?

- So we go to every individual city and of about large cities, so about the population of 200,000 or more.

And we look at the cities that make these data available and essentially spreadsheets or dashboards, to the public, they'll look like dashboards, right?

Where you can look at the time of day, day of week, all these sorts of different metrics.

And we download the data behind that and we aggregate it up to, right now we're doing it by month.

When we started this, we were doing weekly trends because we wanted to know how crime was really evolving rapidly at the beginning of the pandemic, and then throughout the summer with the summer protests.

So we use that data, they're crimes reported to police.

And so that's a major limitation, that's a major limitation with all crime, official crime data that's used by the FBI.

And these numbers essentially are the final ones that will be in the FBI's final counts.

They're preliminary, they do change a little bit, but generally we find that our numbers match really well to the finalized published results.

- So let's get into some of the specifics, Ernesto, start with violent crime.

How did the first six months of this year compare to the first six months of last year?

- Yeah, the overall takeaways that homicide and other violent crimes are declining for the first half of 2025 compared to the first half of 2024.

And that they've continued to fall to pre pandemic levels.

So when we look at homicide, homicide is about 17% lower the first half of 2025 than the first half of 2024.

And then when we take that longer look, looking at the first half of 2019, so pre pandemic, pre 2020, it's about 14% lower.

Other violent crimes follow similar patterns.

Some of the numbers are, are a little bit different, but we find that the overall declines that we're seeing really started around 2023 or even late 2022.

And we continue to see declines in violence and property crimes are a little bit more mixed, but we generally see overall across the board, well across the board of crime types, there are cities that have variation, but across the different types of violence, we do see these declines.

- So you're seeing declines also in sexual assaults.

Can you get into that in a little bit of detail please?

- So the sexual assault numbers, we started to see some declines in the beginning of 2020.

And they just essentially haven't really recovered up to those pre 2020 levels.

There haven't been any major fluctuations.

Like I said, we do see that drop in 2020.

I would say to some extent they kind of follow expected patterns.

But, you know, one thing that we've been surprised to see in sexual assault, would be one of these categories is that we would generally have expected to see most of these crimes return back to pre-pandemic levels.

And the fact that we haven't does suggest that there may be something else going on.

We could talk about what that may or may not be later, but sexual assault has appeared to follow these general trends with other violent crimes.

- Yeah, I'm curious, Ernesto, is there a theory about why violent crime surged, for lack of a better word, during the pandemic?

- The most common explanation is really two parts.

One would be the stress and strain associated with the pandemic, and the other would be related to either changes in policing or decreases in legitimacy that occur in the summer of 2020, right after the murder of George Floyd.

The challenge with these observations, or you know, hypotheses is that we know that homicide in particular was up by about 30% the first two months of 2020 compared to the first two months of 2019.

That's a small sample, only two months.

But that it appears that there was already something percolating and that descriptive result is supported by other academic research.

There was a report put out earlier this year that found a significant increase in gun related homicides occurred in October of 2019, I believe that was using weekly data and found that there was this increase occurring before 2020.

And there's, you know, a fair amount of other research that finds that the first few months of the pandemic weren't really sign significantly different than the first part of 2020.

So again, that January, February timeline, looking at different cities to see if those rates are higher, there wasn't a significant difference, but you start to see it in the summer.

So it's important when you want to explain crime to keep in mind that crime is not just a simple cause and effect.

Crime is a social problem and it has many social contributors that can affect rates.

If we look historically going back to the '90s, there are at least two dozen good explanations of what was the, what could have contributed to the great, what we call it now, the great crime decline of the 1990s.

So crime is really complex and we need more research, more data.

And the last thing I'll say on that is a lot of the academic research, the scholarly research has really stopped or slowed down as crime rates have dropped.

So we really need to continue investigating these crime patterns.

- So why have those studies slowed down?

- You know, it's hard to say, but when you look at the research, for COVID-19 and crime, it was really unique because there were many studies that just looked at one city or two cities or three cities that were sort of the same type of study, same design except just different cities.

So you had a lot of excitement I think in the field and in general, a lot of our study of crime has shifted focus away from trends.

There are still people who study crime trends, but it's not a major, you know, studying in our field.

A lot of people study policing, corrections.

So I think that's part of it is just the focus of crime trends.

And you know, even from a design standpoint, you know, when you have this intervention, this treatment, this natural experiment, you have this clear date that you can use and you can create a good design.

But as those treatments have been sort of fizzling out and haven't really come back, that sort of research design isn't maybe as clear of what it would be.

So I think there was something that made it really attractive and you saw this influx of research, but we don't really have that coming out now and, you know, research tends to be delayed.

So maybe in the next few years we'll start to see more, but we definitely should be using this time to take a closer look at what happened.

- Yeah, one of the things that, so you mentioned violent crimes generally are down by fairly substantial margins between the first six months of 2024 and the first six months of 2025.

The outlier to that though is domestic violence, which saw a modest uptick in rates, again, do you wanna walk us through what that data tells us?

- Yeah, so the council data is kind of an outlier in domestic violence because some sources, some reports found significant increases occurring during the lockdowns of 2020.

We were finding decreases, and that's potentially because we use police reported data, other sources that use surveys or calls to, you know, crisis centers, things like that, have reported increases in domestic violence.

So our, the police numbers and even other reports that use police numbers tend to find similar stories.

Domestic violence that first half of the year compared to last year is about 3% higher.

So, I don't put much, I wouldn't really look too much into that as being some harbinger of some increase in domestic violence because the rates have stayed fairly flat even, you know, they've declined, they fluctuated.

We didn't see any major shifts in domestic violence.

I think though, once we get the full year of data, you know, at the end of 2025 and we take a look at that data, we'll have a better sense if there's something shifting in domestic violence.

But I think one thing that's important to note that, you know, the council has been studying crime trends for a long time and we just don't produce these reports.

We've also put out a report that looks at local estimates of domestic violence using the National Crime Victimization survey.

And what we find is that in many jurisdictions, domestic violence is really under-reported.

And so we've developed this sort of tool for local governments to go to our website and to see the methodology we use and perhaps adopt it to their own jurisdictions to get a better estimate of this unreported number of domestic violence.

So we've done a lot of work on domestic violence and we have a task force on women's justice issues.

So, you know, the council, it's something we've continued to explore, not just in these crime trends reports.

- It's a hugely important question.

We've talked about violent crimes.

Let's talk a little bit about property crimes as well because you see some distinctive trends there between 2024 and 2025 as well.

- Yes, one of the more interesting trends, I would say, has been motor vehicle theft.

And within motor vehicle theft, we saw it was one of the few property crimes, we saw some increase in the summer of 2020, not a major increase, but in the summer of 2022, motor vehicle theft really just shoots up through the roof and particularly starts in Milwaukee and then like, some sort of virus, that sort of spreads to different cities shortly after.

And really what that could be a large share of that could be attributed to was a viral TikTok video that showed how to steal certain Kia and Hyundai vehicles with just using a USB cable.

And so that went viral, I said, around the summer of 2022, many, you know, even though it was taken off TikTok, it was out there, I'm sure other social platforms had it as well.

And then we really start to see this peak in the summer of 2023, then generally declines.

But motor vehicle theft still remains elevated in the first half of 2025.

So even though it's dropped the first half of 2025 by about 25% compared to the first half of 2024, it's 25% higher the first half of 2025, than the first half of 2019.

- So you mentioned TikTok in the case of car theft.

Have you given any thought or studied the overall effect of social media on crime?

- That's a major challenge in our field and there's a lot of discussion on that when it comes to juveniles and it's, right now, it's mixed.

It's something we haven't directly looked at.

And I think what's a major challenge in social media use is identifying what that means, right?

What does it mean when you're using social media?

There's been a big conversation about social media driving public perceptions of crime.

But, you know, that may be you, you're following some influencer who's not really presenting maybe the most information or accurate information or these, you know, incidents become viral, you know.

So I think there's a lot that the field has to reckon with when it comes to social media, but also what are the sources, how are people using them?

Because some social media platforms are, you know, PBS news, you know, those sorts of, you know, organized media outlets compared to, you know, a, you know, someone just running a video from their basement.

So we can't really separate that in our best research.

So we need to do a lot more in understanding how social media affects crime and particularly with juveniles.

- There's more from this data that we wanna get to, but since you mentioned influencers, I wanna talk about the influencer in chief.

The President of the United States has portrayed American cities like Los Angeles and Washington and Chicago and Baltimore as crime infested.

And in a couple of those cities, he's already deployed National Guard forces.

And in the case of Los Angeles, he's called up the US Marines.

What does the data actually tell us about the accuracy or inaccuracy of the portrayal of American cities as being crime infested?

- Well, I think a key phrase here is American cities.

And so, and it's also important to, when we wanna understand crime is what and changes, what's the comparison?

So if we're looking at cities comparing cities within themselves or over time, we can see that for the most part, there are gonna be some exceptions.

Memphis is a good example of this, that doesn't follow this trend of decreased homicide, decreased serious violence, but the US does have a homicide problem compared to other similar countries.

So our homicide rate could be about two and a half to three, even four times higher, depending on the year in country.

So we do have a homicide problem in the US.

Other violent crimes are a little bit more on par that we find.

So that's something to keep in mind is just those comparisons.

Now our homicide rates are significantly lower than where they were like in the 1980s, for instance, when we peaked in 2021.

So we had that big jump from 2019 to 2020, a smaller jump from 2020 to 2021.

That 2021 peak was about a third lower than the homicide peak of 1980.

- Wow.

- So, we still have homicide problems and violent crime problems in the US but generally the trend is getting better.

So something can be improving and still be a problem.

- So another area you looked at was drug offenses.

What did the data tell you there?

- Drug offenses are tricky because the majority of drug offenses are going to be the result of an arrest.

Even though they get classified as an offense, it's typically when police are taking someone in custody, we get that number and we see this decline in drug offenses.

And it's been consistently low though we are seeing some more recent increases.

They haven't really returned back to pre 2020 levels.

So there's some evidence that could be just a reduction of police activity, police contact with people.

There is some evidence that suggests that street drug markets have recently declined, you know, we talked about some of the research that's needed.

I think one of the areas for further exploration is what did the fentanyl market look like on the streets?

You know, what do other drug markets look like and how is that associated with this increase?

So what we're seeing in drug offenses could be an artifact of both reduction in policing and mainly arrests and also an actual reduction in street drug activity.

And the research usually measures that by looking at drug overdose rates if you're interested in certain areas.

So we haven't looked at that yet, but I imagine that there's some relationship there.

- So I'm guessing that in terms of drug offenses, a lot of what happens or many offenses go unreported.

And that's true also as we were talking about in terms of domestic violence, I've written a lot about domestic violence wearing my journalist hat, and it's the same thing.

Things go under reported, not reported.

Can you talk a little bit about that?

- Yeah, and we generally well understood in the field that the less serious an offense, the less likely it is to be reported.

And so that's always a challenge.

But when we look at trends over time, underreporting isn't necessarily a problem unless it changes.

So if 50% of assaults are reported and that number stays consistent, the trend you're capturing is a change in offending.

But if the reporting rate, right, if it goes from 70% of an incident, or 70% of a crime is reported down to 30% and then down 20, then up 80 every, you know, year over year it becomes tricky to tell are you actually looking at changes in, you know, offending or changes in reporting.

And with drug offenses, we haven't really been able to separate out that, you know, there's a large cultural change when it comes to drugs and some of the acceptance of, you know, it's viewed as less serious.

So we haven't, that could definitely affect reporting, but again, it's important to note that a lot of these offenses are going to be the result of another arrest.

So maybe there was a robbery or some other crime, and then when police make that arrest, they find drugs or maybe there's a car stop and drugs.

So a lot of it's gonna be dependent on other activity.

- Ernesto, you told me when we talked previously that you're in the midst of standing up a project, exploring the difference between perception and reality when it comes to trends in crime.

Do you wanna tell us a little bit about that project?

- Sure, I think there's some major challenges when it comes to understanding perceptions of crime.

One is perceptions, is crime going up or down and fear of how worried are people.

And we don't have great measures of that, of what you know, of what crimes people are really afraid of and how well the perception of crime going up and down really match.

So that's one big component that we want to examine.

But also, you know, there's this interesting, sort of puzzle that we have in the US, that any given year for over the past 20 years, over half the country says that crime is going up in the US and we really want to understand why is that number so sticky, right?

It seems to be fairly invariant to national crime rates.

So we're gonna take a really close look at local crime, at local, you know, neighborhood level characteristics, individual characteristics.

So that's something we're gonna explore as well.

And we really wanna develop a project that really aids policy makers in improving conversations about perceptions and really nailing down.

'cause one of the things we are gonna ask people is what will make you feel safe?

What will make you feel unsafe?

And really provide a good resource for the field on talking about perceptions of crime.

Because the reality that many, you know, local leaders face is that, you know, especially in large US cities, even if the crime rate drops, there's still going to be, you know, a homicide.

There's still gonna be, you know, a shooting of an infant or mother, young child, someone else, you know, it just seems like this random act of violence and they're still gonna, you know, these officials are still gonna have to deal with it.

So we really want to nail down and what we're talking about when we say perception and fear of crime to really improve the dialogue and hopefully have better policy.

- So this is kind of the mega question, (chuckles) what are the solutions on crime?

And, you know, crime is, as we all know, has been part of the human experience for all recorded history and prerecorded history, but give us an overview of what some of the solutions might be today.

- Yeah, and I think that's a great point that crime is natural.

That's something that, I think, gets forgotten.

It's a kind of an unfortunate perhaps, you know, reality that we live in, but crime is natural, but we can always do better.

And you know, part of what we've done at the council is we organized the violent crime working group that identified 10 essential actions that cities, because crime is, well, you know, there are national crimes, international crimes, crime is generally that we think of in a street crime is a really local phenomenon, even within the city, even concentrated within neighborhoods.

So that working group identified 10 essential actions, I won't go through all of them here, but I think some of the first few ones are probably the most important.

And that is really establishing an achievable, realistic goal of what cities wanna bring their homicide or violent crime levels down to and make a commitment to stopping that violence.

Second would be to identify the key people and places.

We know that violence is concentrated, that there's a small group of people who are, you know, very serious and habitual offenders are at high risk of crime.

So identifying those people and those places, very small pockets and neighborhoods, will experience high rates of crime.

And just the last one I'll share is once you make those, that commitment, and you identify those places is to then create a plan of how you're going to best approach crime reduction strategies.

There's a whole menu of available strategies to cities and cities have to pick what works best for them, based off their current problems.

But I think the bottom line is that effective crime prevention relies on both policing and community organization input.

- Ernesto Lopez, this has been a fascinating conversation.

You work with the Council on Criminal Justice.

We thank you for spending some time with us today.

That is all the time we have this week.

But if you wanna know more about "Story in the Public Square," you can find us on social media or visit salve.edu/pellcenter where you can always catch up on previous episodes.

For G. Wayne Miller, I'm Jim Ludes asking you to join us again next time for more "Story in the Public Square."

(bright music) (bright music continues) (bright music continues) (bright music continues) (lively music)