Uniform Crime Report (UCR) Part I crimes are the official measure of crime in the United States as collected by the FBI. A full description of those crimes can be found here, but they are made up by violent person crimes (homicide, robbery, assault, rape) and property crimes (theft, auto theft, burglary and arson).

UCR crime totals are notoriously slow to be produced and it will likely be five or six more weeks before the city’s crime totals for the first half of the year are made public.

Fortunately Calls for Service can fill in the gap. This is accomplished by identifying incidents marked ‘Report to Follow’ (RTF) for each of 34 incident types that correspond to UCR Part I crime types.

This is not a perfect way of measuring UCR crime but the CFS totals correlates very closely on a quarterly and annual basis with UCR totals. So this method is great for quickly identifying trends.

CFS totals over the last 13 quarters have, on average, made up 95.2 percent of quarterly UCR totals, so dividing the second quarter CFS count by .952 produces a likely UCR count of 4,723 UCR Part I crimes. To be safe we can add a 90 percent confidence interval (1.645 standard deviations) of +/- 2 percent (between 4,627 and 4,819 UCR Part I crimes).

The quarterly totals for the last seven quarters are shown in the below table. This methodology predicts New Orleans crime dropped roughly 2 percent over the second quarter though some of that may be due to crime deflation caused by response times getting worse over the second quarter.

Quarter UCR Change From Previous
2014 Q4 5,253 N/A
2015 Q1 4,386 -16.50%
2015 Q2 4,570 4.20%
2015 Q3 5,008 9.58%
2015 Q4 5,019 0.22%
2016 Q1 4,814 -4.08%
2016 Q2* 4,723 -1.89%
*Estimate

Crime totals are about 6 percent above where they were at this point last year. This can be seen on the below graph which annualizes the pace of UCR crimes at each day of the year. The pace in 2016 is shown in the black line which clearly shows an uptick in UCR crime over the last few weeks of June.