Posted on February 28, 2023 in News
Every year, tens of thousands of crimes are reported to law enforcement in the city of Phoenix. What crimes are most common? Where are they reported most often? Are there any trends in the number of crimes reported?
The city of Phoenix provides detailed crime report data in its OpenData initiative, with a database that includes homicides, rapes, robberies, aggravated assaults, burglaries, thefts, motor vehicle thefts, arsons, and drug offenses.
We analyzed the data to provide insight into those questions and provide as much information on phoenix crime statistics as possible.
From 2016- 2022, there were 454,226 crimes reported in Phoenix for an average of 64,889 per year. After peaking in 2019 with 68,788, reported crimes have begun to decrease each subsequent year, falling nearly ten percent by 2022 to 62,064.
| Year | Incidents |
|---|---|
| 2016 | 63,256 |
| 2017 | 66,076 |
| 2018 | 64,901 |
| 2019 | 68,788 |
| 2020 | 64,795 |
| 2021 | 64,346 |
| 2022 | 62,064 |
We also examined the number of crimes reported each day. Perhaps unsurprisingly, January 1st has among the highest number of crimes reported each year, likely due to New Year’s Eve activity. Interestingly, 34 of the top 50 single days were the first of a month.
The highest number of reported crimes in a single day? August 1st, 2019 with 282 crimes reported to Phoenix police. The lowest? Christmas in 2022 with 99 crimes reported. In fact, Christmas day was consistently among the lowest crime days, with 4 of the 6 years in among the ten lowest days.
A crime can occur anywhere and in any setting. In Phoenix, the setting where a crime occurs depends, of course, on the type of crime committed.Our dataset contains two types of location data: premises or location type and zip code.
Premise and location type are brief descriptions of the type of location where the crime occurred. This can include an apartment, single-family house, restaurant, hotel, convenience market, the side of the road, etc.
Robberies, for instance, are most likely to happen on the street or in a parking lot. Theft, on the other hand, is most likely to occur at a residence or retail business. Cars are most likely to be reported stolen at an apartment complex.
Unfortunately, detailed address data is blocked in this data set. Therefore, the best way to map this information is using zip codes. This allows us to show which crimes occur most often in which specific areas.
Use the dropdown below to display the data for each type of crime. Both bar charts will update based on your selection.
This analysis is based on crime report data from the City of Phoenix. The database includes data for parts of 2015 and 2023, however we excluded those years from our analysis. The totals and categorical information reflect the years of 2016-2022.
Crime category is based on the offense that was marked by the officer as the primary offense for the incident (more than one offense may be listed as occurring during the same incident). The category for the type of crime is based on the Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR) offense grouping for the primary offense, which may or may not align with the crime category that the official UCR hierarchy criteria would specify for that incident.
Homicides, rapes, robberies, aggravated assaults, burglaries, larcenies/thefts, motor vehicle thefts, arson, and drug crimes are included. All other crime types are excluded from the data.The data does not include information about whether or not the crime was solved or if the report was substantiated.
In future posts, we will examine data on calls for service – events when someone calls the police department for help.