5 tips for reporting on crime data

How to use a new crime data repository, where to turn for numbers since federal funding for public safety research has been gutted, and how to use data to both check statements from public officials and identify crime trends: Those were a few of the takeaways from our recent webinar on digging into crime data.

I moderated the discussion on Feb. 4, which featured insights from:

• Jeffrey A. Butts, a research professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice and Executive Director of the John Jay Research and Evaluation Center.

• Mensah M. Dean, a staff writer at The Trace, a nonprofit newsroom that covers gun violence. Dean covers policies and solutions related to gun violence in the Philadelphia metropolitan area.

• George LeVines, editor of The Trace’s Gun Violence Data Hub, which is open to the public and aims to be the “single most reliable and expansive resource for gun violence in the U.S.”

Experienced crime reporters and journalists new to the beat will find the discussion informative and incisive. But, if you don’t have time to watch the whole thing, keep reading for five takeaways.

1. Get to know The Trace’s Gun Violence Data Hub.

There are three main components to the Gun Violence Data Hub.

The help desk is where anyone – including journalists and academic researchers — can ask questions of reporters and editors at The Trace. Reach out for help understanding gun violence in the areas you cover; collecting, cleaning and analyzing data on gun violence; and proposing collaborations on journalistic or research projects.

On the resources page, find fact sheets, guides and a glossary that can kickstart investigations into gun violence issues locally, statewide and nationally.

And use the data library for trustworthy data on a range of gun violence topics, from ghost guns to suicide to road rage to mass shootings across a range of geographies.

The library includes data from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Transportation Security Administration and many others.

“We’ve got 21 datasets right now updating at various intervals — some daily, some weekly, monthly, quarterly, yearly,” LeVines said.

2. Explore data alternatives in the wake of federal funding cuts for public safety research and data.

In April 2025 the U.S. Department of Justice cancelled about $500 million in grants for many public safety initiatives, including more than $60 million for research, evaluation and data collection.

“The state of federally sponsored gun research is really poor right now,” Butts said. The John Jay Research and Evaluation Center, along with other programs that research solutions to public safety issues, have seen awarded federal funding withdrawn, he said.

Learn more about federal cutbacks for criminal justice research in this explainer from the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University.

Researchers are increasingly turning to philanthropic foundations, along with state and local governments, where competition for grants is stiff, Butts said.

“The workforce has not gone away but the support for it has been slashed badly,” he added. “It’s not just crime and justice, obviously. Health, environment — everything’s been slashed.”

While nothing will replace the research and data collection that rescinded federal grants would have made possible, there are still reliable data sources that reporters covering gun violence can use.

The WONDER database from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention includes numbers on gun deaths and is being updated, LeVines said.

Shortly before President Donald Trump was inaugurated for a second term, the CDC launched a dashboard mapping violent death rates across the country by Census tract, county or state. It also remains active.

For other data sources, Dean pointed to these:

• The Washington Post’s database of police shootings, which covers 2015 to 2024.
• The Henry A. Wallace Police Crime Database from Bowling Green University, which includes more than 20,000 cases from 2005 to 2021 where local or state law enforcement officers were charged with one or more crimes.
• The Gun Violence Archive, an independent nonprofit that tracks gun violence incidents across the country from more than 7,500 sources, including law enforcement agencies and news media reports.
• And Mapping Police Violence, which tracks police-involved killings in the U.S. It’s produced by Campaign Zero, a nonprofit that advocates for policies that aim to eliminate killings by law enforcement.

“But the front line, I would say, is that you’ve got to get to know your police departments,” Dean said. “Becoming acquainted with their system of how they present their data online is essential.”

3. Know which data can help you fact-check statements from public officials.

Too often, news stories quote local or police officials without fact checking, Butts said.

Quotes without context or fact-checking can especially mislead the public when officials want credit for crime reductions.

“If they’re smart, they don’t come right out and say, ‘We did this.’ But they’ll say, ‘We’re pleased to see these numbers coming down.’ And then they assert their hypotheses … and it’s possible to check these statements,” he said.

Homicide rates are useful for tracking public safety over time, he added. That’s because homicides are more likely to reported than lower-level crimes, such as assault or vandalism. Particularly for property crimes, that data is tracking the probability that a crime is reported, not whether a crime occurred.

“You’re just measuring police activity,” Butts said. “You’re not measuring public safety.”

Beyond published data on reported crimes, victimization surveys are a major source of crime data that journalists can use to vet statements from officials.

The best known is the National Crime Victimization Survey from the U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics. This survey each year reaches a nationally representative sample of roughly 240,000 people and asks whether they have been victims of personal or property crimes — and why the crime was or wasn’t reported to police.

But while victimization surveys are done well at the national level, there’s a need for repeated surveys with consistent methodologies at local levels, Butts said. National surveys don’t allow for direct comparisons of crime victimization between cities.

“It’s not exactly how you make sure that Dubuque, Iowa, is experiencing more safety — by asking the whole country about their experience of crime,” he said.

Journalists should be aware of this limitation of victimization data, though it’s worth checking if the city you cover has conducted recent victimization surveys.

4. Use at least five years of data to report trends.

Police departments are another critical data source for reporters covering criminal justice, along with district and state attorney offices, Dean said.

He recommends that reporters covering criminal justice and public safety look to at least five years of data to identify trends within a specific area.

“Between 5 and 10 years for almost any type of story you’re reporting on would give you a good window of time on how a situation is trending,” he said.

5. Question data that doesn’t make sense.

While working on a piece on record low homicides in Philadelphia, Dean said he went searching for other data on gun crimes for context. When he looked up shooting incidents for 2026 from the Philadelphia Police Department website, it said there were none in January.

That didn’t seem right, so Dean left that data out of the story.

Last week, after he talked to a police department spokesperson, the database was updated to show dozens of shootings for January.

“If anything looks suspicious or hanky, unless you can get someone on the phone to explain that to you, I would highly recommend that you not use those numbers,” Dean said.