Violent crime decreased in the US in 2024, along with property crime, murder and robbery, while the number of reported assaults on officers reached a 10-year high, according to FBI data released Tuesday.
According to the FBI’s Reported Crimes in the Nation, a report that relies on local law enforcement submitting data to the FBI’s federal system, violent crime decreased an estimated 4.5% compared to the previous year and property damage went down just over 8%.
Murders, too, decreased by an estimated 14.9%, along with robbery, which went down nearly 9%.
The statistics are at odds with comments President Donald Trump made throughout his campaign last year, arguing that crime was “way up” and claiming that “we’ve never seen crime like this before.”
Reported assaults on officers, however, increased from over 83,000 in 2023 to 85,730 in 2024, marking a 10-year high of assaults on law enforcement officers. In 2015, that number was significantly lower, with 52,448 reported assaults.
“Between 2021 and 2024, we had 258 law enforcement officers feloniously killed in the line of duty,” a law enforcement official told reporters on a briefing call announcing the report, including 64 last year.
The FBI is working on an in-depth behavioral analysis study to figure out why assaults on officers are increasing.
“It’s going to be a longer study, because we are doing a real, in-depth behavioral analysis study of why these are occurring,” the official said.
The FBI’s crime report includes reporting from law enforcement agencies covering over 90% of the population in the US and will soon be available on a monthly basis, the official said during Tuesday’s call.
Hate crimes decreased slightly by 1.5%, according to the FBI’s estimate for 2024 and motor vehicle theft dropped by a significant 19.5% when compared to 2023, though the rate remains higher than it was in the previous decade, from 2010 to 2021. Robbery, the report for 2024 says, was near its lowest rate in the last 20 years.
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