Forecasting US Crime Rates and the Impact of Reductions in Imprisonment: 1960–2025

The model continues to perform well and supports the expectation that in the near future the violent crime rate will increase modestly and then flatten, while the property crime rate will continue its longstanding decline. [...] 1 Trends in US Crime There are two primary ways that crime rates are estimated in the United States: the Uniform Crime Reports (UCR) compiled by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and the National Crime Victimization Surveys (NCVS) conducted by the US Census and reported by the Bureau of Justice Statistics.1 The UCR counts crimes reported to the police and has the advan- tage of long histor. [...] This method forecasts the impact of multiple factors on the total crime rate (i.e., the sum of the rates of violent and property crime). [...] The closer the forecasted crime rates are to the ob- served rates during the validation period, the greater our confidence in the forecasts for 2021 to 2025, when the crime rates are unknown. [...] The rates were computed by adding each year’s change in the crime rate to the crime rate of the previous year.