The Marshall Project (website) non-profit journalism for criminal justice

FBI Uniform Crime Statistics, Murder Rate Per 100,000 People: 1960 - 2015 (FBI)

The Atlantic, The Presence of Justice (The Atlantic) a collection of articles

ArcGIS, Analyzing Violent Crime (ArcGIS website) with Chicago as an example - violent crime geographically correlated with unemployment, not with liquor stores, and slightly with poverty

Bill Quigley, Fourteen Examples of Racism in Criminal Justice System. Huffington Post, Jul 26, 2010.

Corky Siemaszko and Robert Gearty, Stop-and-Frisk Trial: Cop’s Secret Tape Reveals Boss Ordered Him to Target Blacks Males Ages 14 to 21. New York Daily News, Mar 21, 2013.

A top Bronx cop was caught on tape telling an NYPD whistleblower to specifically target “male blacks 14 to 21” for stop-and-frisk because they commit crimes. Stop “the right people, the right time, the right location,” Deputy Inspector Christopher McCormack is heard saying on the recording.

“He meant blacks and Hispanics,” Officer Pedro Serrano, who made the secret recording, testified Thursday in Manhattan federal court. “So what am I supposed to do: Stop every black and Hispanic?” Serrano was heard saying on the tape, which was recorded last month at the 40th Precinct in the Bronx.

McCormack said to focus on the Mott Haven section, where the problem “was robberies and grand larcenies.” “I have no problem telling you this,” the inspector said on the tape. “Male blacks. And I told you at roll call, and I have no problem [to] tell you this, male blacks 14 to 21.”

During cross examination, City lawyer Brenda Cooke got Serrano to admit that McCormack never said he wanted Serrano to stop all blacks and Hispanics. “Those specific words, no,” he told her. Serrano’s tape and testimony were introduced as evidence in a class-action lawsuit against the NYPD’s controversial stop-and-frisk tactic brought by four black New Yorkers who claim they were targeted because of their race. Also, the first of several tapes surreptitiously made by Brooklyn cop Adrian Schoolcraft made its debut at the trial.

This one was recorded at a Nov. 1, 2008, roll call and on it Lt. Jean Delafuente is heard telling officers that making the arrest quota should be easy in Bedford-Stuyvesant. “You’re working in Bed-Stuy, where everyone’s probably got a warrant,” he said. Schoolcraft claims he was hauled off to a psych ward to discredit his allegations that the 81st Precinct pushed officers to fill arrest quotas. Serrano told the court he taped McCormick because he had gotten poor performance reviews for failing to meet what he claims was the monthly quota of 20 summonses and five stops-and-frisk and wanted evidence to show he was being retaliated against.

For speaking out, the 43-year-old cop who joined the NYPD in 2004 testified earlier that he was smeared as a “rat” and ostracized by fellow officers. Like Adhyl Polanco, the whistleblower officer who testified before him, Serrano said the quota system had the backing of the Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association.

Ryan Devereaux, New York's Stop-and-Frisk Trial Comes to a Close with Landmark Ruling. The Guardian, Aug 12, 2013. An update on the NYPD racial profiling whistleblower account.

A federal judge's ruling that the New York City police department has for years turned a blind eye to widespread constitutional rights violations was hardly a surprise to those who have closely tracked the legal challenges to the NYPD's stop-and-frisk regime.

Stop-and-frisk as implemented by the NYPD violates an individual's right to protection under the fourth and 14th amendments of the constitution, judge Shira Scheindlin found in a 195-page ruling. She ordered the appointment of a federal monitor for the nation's largest police force, a measure NYPD commissioner Ray Kelly and New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg have long resisted.

The decision was the result of a landmark two-and-a-half month trial that concluded in May. The federal class action lawsuit, Floyd v City of New York, was filed by four African American men in 2008 who claimed to represent hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers unlawfully stopped by the NYPD. Eight more witnesses, all African American or Latino, also testified to being stopped, and in some cases frisked and searched, unlawfully. Together the plaintiffs described a total of 19 stops. Forty-one police officers also testified, including a recently retired chief of the department, as well as several law enforcement experts. The plaintiffs set out to prove widespread and systemic fourth and 14th constitutional rights violations resulting from the NYPD's stop-and-frisk practices.

The Sentencing Project, Race and Punishment: Racial Perceptions of Crime and Support for Punitive Policies. The Sentencing Project, 2014.

Ta-Nehisi Coates, Other People's Pathologies. The Atlantic, Mar 30, 2014.  On distinguishing between a culture of poverty and black culture.

Rich Flanagan, Why Do Rich Kids Commit Crimes?  Pacific Standard, Apr 30, 2014 and Jun 14, 2017.  “A 2012 report in The Journal of Research on Adolescence found that “boys living in the most affluent neighborhoods reported higher delinquency levels” than boys living in middle-class ones. Yet, generally, “family affluence, even at the highest levels, predicted lower problem levels for youth.”  According to a 2007 study published in Current Directions in Psychological Science: “Early adolescents at both socioeconomic extremes showed admiration for classmates who openly flouted authority. In the suburban context, high peer status was linked with overt displays of low academic effort, disobedience at school, aggressiveness among girls, and substance use among boys.””

John R. Lott, Jr., Blacks Trust Police More Than Whites Do. Fox News, Dec 19, 2014.  Whites underreport crimes more than blacks, curiously.

Dara Lind and German Lopez, 16 Theories For Why Crime Plummeted in the US. Vox, May 20, 2015.

Dara Lind, The US is Safer - and Americans Don't Have Any Idea. Vox, Apr 7, 2016.  Crime rates are down.

Maria Sacchetti, Criminal Immigrants Reoffend at Higher Rates Than ICE Has Suggested. Boston Globe, Jun 4, 2016.

Bethania Palma Markus, NYPD Cop Secretly Records Supervisor Pressuring Him to Racially Profile Black Men. Raw Story, Jul 13, 2016.

Olivia Li, The Vicious Cycle of Everyday Gun Violence and Eroding Police Relations. The Trace, Jul 22, 2016.

German Lopez, How America's Criminal Justice System Became the Country's Mental Health System. Vox, Jul 27, 2016.

German Lopez, Confronting the Myth that "Black Culture" is Responsible for Violent Crime in America. Vox, Sep 1, 2016.

David Bier, Donald Trump Is Wrong—Immigrants Don’t Commit More Crimes. Cato Institute, Sep 27, 2016.

Lewis Beale, ‘The 13th’: Ava DuVernay’s Damning Netflix Doc Finds the Truth About Mass Incarceration. Daily Beast, Oct 3, 2016.

German Lopez, Americans Don't Know Crime Has Plummeted; In Fact, They Think It's Gone Up. Vox, Oct 10, 2016.

Michael Jonas, Mapping Incarceration in Boston. Commonwealth Magazine, Nov 10, 2016.

Danielle Sered, Accounting for Violence: How to Increase Safety and Break Our Failed Reliance on Mass Incarceration. Vera, Feb 2017.

Eli Hager and Bill Keller, Everything You Think You Know About Mass Incarceration Is Wrong. The Marshall Project, Feb 9, 2017.  A very helpful analysis of violent vs. non-violent crime, federal vs. state prison populations, and the role of the prosecutor.

Ed Stetzer, NORP Think and the U.S. Criminal Justice System. Christianity Today, May 19, 2017.

Mike Males, White People Should Be More Afraid of Other Whites Than They Are of People of Color. Los Angeles Times, Aug 3, 2017.

German Lopez, We Don't Need Mass Incarceration to Keep People Safe. This Chart Proves It. Vox, Jan 16, 2018.

Jonathan Greenblatt, The Resurgent Threat of White-Supremacist Violence. The Atlantic, Jan 17, 2018.

Francesca Mirabile, Chicago Still Isn’t the Murder Capital of America. The Trace, Jan 18, 2017.

Anna Flagg, The Myth of the Criminal Immigrant. New York Times, Mar 30, 2018.

Debbie Nathan, How the Border Patrol Faked Statistics Showing a 73 Percent Rise in Assaults Against Agents. The Intercept, Apr 23, 2018.

Paul D. White, May 3 Ventura Rally Against Vagrant Crime: A Cause That Everyone Can Support. Ventura Citizens Journal, Apr 29, 2018.  On the relation between homelessness and crime.

Alex Nowrasteh and Andrew C. Forrester, Illegal Immigrant Conviction Rates Are Low, Even When Factoring in Recidivism. Cato Institute, Jan 7, 2019.

Alec MacGillis, The Tragedy of Baltimore. New York Times Magazine, Mar 12, 2019.  Baltimore before and after the Freddie Gray incident.  Summarized by Bret Stephens, American Crime and the Baltimore Model. New York Times, Jul 17, 2020.  “In 2014, there were 211 homicides in the city of Baltimore. The following year, there were 342, an astonishing increase of 62 percent. The murder rate has barely budged since. What happened? On April 12, 2015, Freddie Gray sustained a fatal injury in the back of a police van. Peaceful protests and then violence ensued. A demoralized, under-resourced and sometimes corrupt police force stopped doing its job properly. Nearly 30,000 residents have since fled the city, whose population is now the lowest it’s been in a century.” Criticizes Baltimore as if it is a standard of “progressive fantasies.”

Michael Herriot, A Judge Asked Harvard to Find Out Why So Many Black People Were In Prison. They Could Only Find 1 Answer: Systemic Racism. The Root, Sep 10, 2020.  refers to Elizabeth Tsai Bishop, Brook Hopkins, Chijindu Obiofuma, Felix Owusu, Racial Disparities in the Massachusetts Criminal System. The Criminal Justice Study Program, Harvard University, Sep 2020.

Michael T. Light, Jingying He, and Jason P. Robey, Comparing Crime Rates Between Undocumented Immigrants, Legal Immigrants, and Native-born US Citizens in Texas.  Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences | U.S. Department of Justice, Dec 2020.  “The study found that undocumented immigrants had substantially lower crime rates than native-born citizens and legal immigrants across a range of felony offenses. Relative to undocumented immigrants, U.S.-born citizens are over 2 times more likely to be arrested for violent crimes, 2.5 times more likely to be arrested for drug crimes, and over 4 times more likely to be arrested for property crimes. In addition, the proportion of arrests involving undocumented immigrants in Texas was relatively stable or decreasing over this period. The differences between U.S.-born citizens and undocumented immigrants are robust to using alternative estimates of the broader undocumented population, alternate classifications of those counted as “undocumented” at arrest and substituting misdemeanors or convictions as measures of crime.”

Elizabeth Nolan Brown, Violent Crime in Baltimore Plunges After City Ditches Prosecution of Prostitution, Drug Possession, Other Minor Offenses. Reason, Apr 1, 2021.  The focus on violent vs. non-violent crime pays off. “After a year of foregoing prosecution of certain nonviolent misdemeanor crimes, Baltimore has seen a serious drop in violent crimes and property crimes, too. Between March 2020 and March 2021, violent crime in Baltimore dropped 20 percent and property crime dropped 36 percent. Homicides were also down slightly (13 fewer compared to the previous year).”

Emma Tucker and Peter Nickeas, The US Saw Significant Crime Rise Across Major Cities in 2020. And It's Not Letting Up. CNN, Apr 3, 2021.  “Sixty-three of the 66 largest police jurisdictions saw increases in at least one category of violent crimes in 2020, which include homicide, rape, robbery, and aggravated assault, according to a report produced by the Major Cities Chiefs Association. Baltimore City, Baltimore County and Raleigh, North Carolina, did not report increases in any of the violent crime categories.” 

Rep. Val Demings (Twitter, Jun 25, 2021.  Demings points out that the strategy and philosophy of policing impacts the violent crime rate. “President Biden’s new crime plan follows the same model we successfully used in Orlando: crack down on violent criminals, get guns out of the wrong hands, and partner with the community. Our effort reduced violent crime by 40%.”

Krystal Ball and Saagar Enjeti, Charles Lehman: Fact Vs. Fiction On Why Murders Spiked 30% In 2020. Breaking Points, Oct 4, 2021.  Highlights many puzzling relationships. There is no relation between gun purchases and homicide rates by state. The increases in homicide rates occurred in suburbs and rural areas.

Jeff Asher, Murder Rose by Almost 30% in 2020. It’s Rising at a Slower Rate in 2021. New York Times, Nov 15, 2021 update.  “The change in murder was widespread — a national phenomenon and not a regional one. Murder rose over 35 percent in cities with populations over 250,000 that reported full data. It also rose over 40 percent in cities 100,000 to 250,000, and around 25 percent in cities under 25,000.”

David Zipper, The Deadly Myth That Human Error Causes Most Car Crashes. The Atlantic, Nov 26, 2021.  “Every year thousands of Americans die on the roads. Individuals take the blame for systemic problems.” American individualism means that car crashed are attributed to individual drivers, cyclists, and pedestrians. Civil engineers, urban planners, etc. do not shoulder responsibility. But in the EU, they do. “In the European Union, whose population is one-third larger than America’s, traffic deaths dropped by 36 percent between 2010 and 2020, to 18,800. That downward trend is no accident: European regulators have pushed carmakers to build vehicles that are safer for pedestrians and cyclists, and governments regularly adjust road designs after a crash to reduce the likelihood of recurrence.”

Mehdi Hasan, Race Hard To Ignore In Sentencing Differences In Voting Cases.  MSNBC, Apr 16, 2022.  Hasan compares white men who commit voter fraud to people of color:  Crystal Mason (Texas)

Cody Johnston and Katy Stoll, The Devastating Impact of 'Fear of Crime' Politics. Some More News, Apr 20, 2022. How crime stats get used by politicians — especially conservative ones — to stoke fear or celebrate supposed accomplishments. Meanwhile, wage theft is not considered a crime, showing that corporate interests dominate the criminal justice system. Johnston argues that crime stats are used to divide the American public by race.

01:00 - The Giant Crime Wave That Doesn’t Actually Exist.  Conservatives, and increasingly liberals, use increasing crime rates to stoke fears before elections and use declining crime rates during tenure. 

11:31 - What Is Crime?  Wage theft is not considered a crime, showing that corporate interests govern the definition of “crime.”

18:00 - Why The Crimerate Has Actually Fallen.  People make these claims despite counterfactuals:  crime has decreased, generally.  

25:30 - The Impact Of The Fear of Crime Or Joe Biden and his Fear of Crime Legacy

41:30 - The War On The War On Drugs

50:20 - Our Crime Policies Are Designed To Divide Us By Race

1:06:30 - Corporations Want to Keep The Status Quo 

John Oliver, Crime Reporting. Last Week Tonight with John Oliver (HBO), Oct 10, 2022. Brilliant critique of the police as an interest group and journalists as lazy when they report, “Police say…”

Briahna Joy Gray and Robby Soave, Debate: Crime Reportedly 'Top Of Mind' For Voters’ Behind The Economy, Is It Copaganda?  Rising | The Hill, Nov 2, 2022.  A very lively debate on why crime is such a political issue:  does poverty cause crime sufficiently; what about mental health supports; are jobs and social supports a more effective way to reduce crime than increasing police funding and staffing; etc.

Alexi McCammond, Not an Anomaly: 2020’s Red States Have Higher Murder Rates.  Axios, Jan 27, 2023. 

Noah Smith, Interracial Violence Is Rare in the United States. Noahpinion | Substack, May 10, 2023. Pinion points out that white on white violence is by far the highest category, and same-race violence in general is highest. The left, however, likes to feature white on minority violence, while the right spotlights white victims.

Ari Melber, Hannity Exposed: 'Just Comply' Lie Shredded in DOJ’s Trump Charges.  The Beat | MSNBC, Jun 23, 2023.  “Donald Trump’s arrest shows the GOP’s double standard on FBI “compliance.” While many suspects are given minutes to comply with police, Trump was given months. In this special report, MSNBC Chief Legal Correspondent Ari Melber exposes the GOP’s double standard on “police rules.””

Morning Joe, What Trump Gets Wrong When He Talks About Cities as Crime Dens.  Morning Joe | MSNBC, Dec 1, 2023.  Seven of ten top cities on gun deaths per capita are Republican.  “After Sen. John Kennedy, R-La., received a correction this week on gun statistics during a senate hearing, the Morning Joe panel discusses Sen. Kennedy's remarks along with Trump statements from March on cities as crime dens and what those comments get wrong.”

Chris Hayes, Debunking the Right-wing Myth of the ‘Migrant Crime Surge’. All In | MSNBC, Feb 29, 2024. Simply not true. See also Olympia Sonnier and Garrett Hawke, Trump's Claims of a Migrant Crime Wave Are Not Supported by National Data. NBC News, Feb 29, 2024. And Alex Nowrasteh, Illegal Immigrants Have a Low Homicide Conviction Rate. Deep Dives, Feb 28, 2024. Setting the Record Straight on Illegal Immigrant Crime in Texas.

Judd Legum and Tesnim Zekeria, New Data Explodes Myth of Crime Wave Fueled by Migrants. Popular Information, Mar 12, 2024. “In January 2024, the Republican National Committee claimed that “crime continues at historic highs in Democrat-run cities.” Representative Jim Jordan (R-OH) declared in February 2024 that “[i]n Joe Biden’s America you get…cities plagued with crime.” These claims, however, are not supported by facts.  The most comprehensive look at violent crime in the United States in 2023 will come when the FBI publishes its national Uniform Crime Report. But that will not happen until the fall. But, as crime analyst Jeff Asher explains in his newsletter, the FBI report is based on individual Uniform Crime Reports submitted by each state. Asher identified 14 states that have released their Uniform Crime Reports publicly. The data has not been completely finalized and could be adjusted slightly before formally submitting it to the FBI. But this data is the best early look at violent crime trends last year.  Asher found that both murder and violent crime declined in 12 of 14 states. “

Chris Stirewalt, Emerging from a Long Pandemic Hangover. The Dispatch, Apr 16, 2024. “The murder rate and traffic deaths are decreasing, and drug overdoses appear to be leveling off.”

American Immigration Council, Debunking the Myth of Immigrants and Crime. American Immigration Council, Oct 2024.

Peter Zeihan, Trump Takes on Illegal Immigration. Zeihan on Geopolitics, Feb 28, 2025. Migrants who are legally under the asylum laws have a strong incentive to not commit crimes, because of the threat of deportation if they do. Also, because Trump wants showy media coverage of deportations, he is diverting excessive resources from law enforcement away from money laundering, sex trafficking, child porn dealers, etc. They are going after groups of undocumented people who are not likely to commit crimes: people who attend churches and use food banks and stand in the Home Depot parking lots and people who go to their court hearings. This will build crime possibilities in places like Denver, Phoenix, Salt Lake City, Albuquerque, San Antonio, Dallas, Austin, Houston, New Orleans, Birmingham, Atlanta, Mobile, Richmond, Charlotte, and major cities where industry is concentrated and where Latino migrants are likely to locate. There is now no point for migrants to cooperate with the system. We are going back to the system we had before the 2000s where migrants really were an underclass.

Rebecca Watson, Study: Conservatives Hate Science (All Of It). Rebecca Watson (Skepchick), Apr 23, 2025. At the 5:55 minute mark, Rebecca notes that a study finding that immigrants, including undocumented immigrants, commit fewer crimes than U.S. citizens has been taken down from the federal DOJ website! But the House of Representatives keeps a copy: See Michael T. Light, Undocumented Immigrant Offending Rate Lower Than U.S.-Born Citizen Rate, National Institute of Justice, Sep 12, 2024. Also here and here.

Matt Brown and Mike Pesoli, Mississippi Becomes Fourth State to Send National Guard to DC. The Associated Press | Military Times, Aug 18, 2025. “Joining forces from three other Republican-led states, the Mississippi National Guard will deploy 200 troops to Washington as part of the Trump administration’s ongoing federal policing and immigration overhaul in the nation’s capital.

Mississippi Gov. Tate Reeves said in a statement Monday that he has approved the deployment of approximately 200 Mississippi National Guard Soldiers to Washington, D.C. “Crime is out of control there, and it’s clear something must be done to combat it,” Reeves said.

Mississippi joins three other states that have pledged to deploy hundreds of National Guard members to the nation’s capital to bolster the Republican administration’s operation aiming to transform policing in the Democratic-led city through a federal crackdown on crime and homelessness. West Virginia said it was deploying 300 to 400 troops, South Carolina pledged 200 and Ohio said it will send 150 in the coming days, deployments that built on top of President Donald Trump’s initial order that 800 National Guard troops deploy as part of the federal intervention.”

Jackson, Mississippi had the highest homicide rate out of U.S. cities in 2024, at 77 per 100,000. St. Louis, Missouri had a rate of over 80 per 100,000 for several years prior. Memphis, Tennessee had the highest violent crime rate at roughly 2,400 per 100,000. St. Louis’ rate has been about 2,000.

Noah Smith, Good Cities Can’t Exist Without Public Order. Noahpinion | Substack, Sep 16, 2025. Safety on public transportation.

Henry Grabar, The Great Crime Decline Is Happening All Across the Country. The Atlantic, Jan 21, 2026. “Even cities with understaffed police departments have made record gains.”