Q3 2025 Crime Trends

My name is Emily Blackburn and I’m the Director of Geospatial Crime Solutions at CAP Index. This is our video series on crime trends and location types. If this is your first video, welcome. This is a series where we talk about crime trends over a dozen plus cities across the U.S. and we update it each quarter. If you want more details on how we do this or how the dashboard works or just a refresher, go back to the original video called Crime Location Dashboard Overview, and we’ll be sure to link that in the video notes so that you can easily access it. But quarter three data is in, so we will jump right into the series.

The headlines are that overall crime continues to be down while several subtypes kick those conventions, particularly motor vehicle parts theft, which is a very specific subset of crime. And shoplifting continues to confound us and do different things depending on exactly what you’re looking at. So we will cover those here in the next few minutes. But again, crime continues to downturn on the national scale. And we look at the change over the year and quarters, we see that that is getting more positive as we go along. So again, year to date, we’re down almost 11%. And this started with a 6% downturn at the last quarter and continues. So this quarter was our lowest or biggest drop at 14%, not that much more than what we saw in Q1, which is almost 14%. So it’s pretty neck and neck. And we just lost a little oomph there in the middle or the second quarter of the year. But that continues to go along and be a steady trend. But it’s good to note that this doesn’t necessarily happen across all cities.

There are a couple of cities, if we look at, say, just Charlotte, Mecklenburg, for instance, that city has not seen those trends. So when we look at national trends, it’s important to look at places and seeing what the national averages are. So, you know, it’s good to know that this averages out. Charlotte is seeing some positive news this quarter, but not enough to erase what has been a rough 2025. Chicago, similar. Q2 was rough, but overall, year -to -date, they’re down just a little bit.

So it really depends on where we’re looking. But across the US, across 13, 14 cities, what we’re seeing is these overall downtrends of crime, which is wonderful and what we would like to see. It’s very important as we look at guardianship and what we’re going to do as businesses, what’s going on where. That’s something that CAP Index can obviously help you out with. Our next page details what type of crimes, the very specific crime type as opposed to crime category. And the only thing that is up this quarter is theft of motor vehicle parts or accessories, and it’s a pretty good with a 30% jump.

And I think that’s important because these aren’t small numbers changes. We have between 17- and 20,000 in the nine -month span that we’re in right now. So it’s not like rape, which is 650 to 625, so less than 1 ,000. This is in the 17- to 20,000 range. So, you know, not a small number, big percentage change, but something that’s been driven. So it’s still very out of character.

So one of the things that I looked at or looked for was to see if at a specific agency drove this and what I found was LA became problematic when looking at this and when you look here it’s up a thousand percent. So what’s going on with LA and I’m going to help make this clear I’m going to look at the two most like crimes just from motor vehicle and of motor vehicle parts and accessories. So motor vehicle parts and accessories tends to be things like catalytic converter theft, which is very much driven by metal prices or car repair prices. If you take a whole muffler or things like that, whereas theft from motor vehicle is more parsed into things like breaking into the car and taking change or cell phones or things from inside the vehicle. And what we saw over the past year in LA is switching from one records management system to the other.

There was a time when they were bridging two because they brought divisions over one by one. And as LA has has transitioned to the new records management system, it’s added more detail. So whereas they didn’t report in previous years theft of motor vehicle parts or accessories, and that was housed either under theft from motor vehicle or the sort of all other larceny catch -all, both of which are down by half, that sort of picks up the transition here to where overall it’s down 38 % if we look at all three of those things. So when we’re looking at, let’s go back to all crime and we’ll do all agencies, we’ll take out LA, and we still see theft from motor vehicle comes up then, right, into the mix. And theft of motor vehicle parts or accessories search is still the highest, but it is less high than it was.

It’s half, but it’s still up 17%, which is, again, we’re talking 16,000 to 18,000 is a big jump. It’s a couple thousand higher over a few dozen cities. So we want to look at what the driver is, where that’s coming from. Then, so what we want to do then is look at where is this happening? And I think the important thing to look at it was where this is happening. We’ll turn just this on.

We’ll also turn on theft from motor vehicle because it’s such a kindred spirit. Because what we want to know when we’re talking to businesses, what does this matter to me as someone in a GSOC or someone who is in charge of security and guardianship for a company? And mostly when we’re talking about this kind of crime, it’s parking lot security, right? So is this happening at the kind of business I am and what we’re seeing is and what’s good news for some of the businesses is happening at train terminals, bus stations, those kind of places, so long term parking. It’s happening in the highway road street section, which is a lot of residential parking or when people park on the street or in parking lots, it’ll be called highway road street in general, but it’s not necessarily happening at shopping malls. So not shopping mall parking lots, not a drop lot for commuters, not at schools, not at commercial office buildings, which is interesting, right?

Not at department discount stores. Not at grocery stores. It may be important to a lot of our clientele in the future, and it’s definitely one to keep on our radar, and it’s something when I go in to do the Q4 update, it’s one of the first things I will look at. But it doesn’t appear to be strongly affecting businesses at this juncture, but it may be a warning shot. If metal prices go up, if other things happen, then those might go up. But parking lots at these places also often have a lot of guardianship, so that guardianship may be tamping that down in advance where the guardianship doesn’t exist with, say, side street parking, for instance.

So, overall, interesting things happening there. If we turn everything back on, And start afresh, let’s really focus in on shoplifting. Shoplifting is confounding right now.

And I see that in the sense that when we look at everything, it was down 7% last quarter 1, it was down 7% quarter 2, it was down 13% this quarter.

And when I talk to my colleagues and clients, they’re not feeling bad. They’re like, no, we’re having shoplifting problems. So then where is the disconnect coming from when we’re talking to people and what we’re seeing in the data? And I think where that happens is if we switch over here to looking at where things are happening and we click on just our shoplifting, this changes. And what we’re seeing is grocery stores aren’t feeling this.

Let’s make sure I’ve got everything set right. It was down a little bit in quarter one, but the last quarter, but like minimal, marginal, insignificant amount, it was up almost 14%. in the last quarter, 20% the first quarter, 22% this quarter. So it’s very specific to grocery stores. And where I think it gets more interesting is convenience stores, which I think are next. We talk about motor vehicle theft, theft from motor vehicle, motor vehicle parts being stolen are sisters or kindred spirits…convenience stores and grocery stores are the same thing. Very kindred spirits, very kindred things that get shoplifted from them. And while it’s down, it’s down a statistically insignificant amount this quarter, whereas it was up 27 percent in Q1 and 10 percent in Q2. However, the inverse of this is department discount stores, specialty stores and shopping malls. And the first two being the ones that have just really thousands and thousands of crimes, the lion’s share, have been down. And so that’s what’s driving this overall downturn.

They’re down overall in the year in the 12% to 13% range. Q1, they’re down in the 10%. Q2, 7 to 8 percent and really coming down this quarter at 15 to nearly 19 percent. And so that’s really what’s driving this downturn in shopping malls, which was down 31 percent this quarter. So what it looks like then at a glance is sort of this consumable. edible items are really what’s driving the upturn in shoplifting while sort of wearables and household goods aren’t being shoplifted as much currently.

So if we go back over to and we’ll see this play out again if we go back to page 1, when we look at shoplifting and we look at location types, if we really just parse this down to grocery stores, we’ll see is while it was down just a little bit in January and February. Otherwise, we see a clear upward trend across each month, and it’s just curving up, up, up as we go across each each month and year. Whereas if we look at things like department and discount stores and shopping malls and specialty stores, the story is a little different where it went up the last three years and back down again. And so this up and then down, up and then down, up and then down, which means while shopping malls, specialty stores, department discount stores are seeing a downtrend.

Again, the people in charge of security for those places may not yet be feeling it because we’re really regressing to the mean. We had a big uptick in 2024, and now we’re seeing a downturn, but not enough to make up for that downtrend as a whole. So the news is good in that there is further we can go. We haven’t reached what could potentially be the bottom of shoplifting decreases within that industry. So for those places that news is relatively positive, where it’s not positive is for sort of the grocery industry, which is going to keep seeing these increases as food prices and food insecurity is sort of one of the overarching news stories of the day, sort of the end of Q3 and into Q4 2025.

So that’s what we’re seeing. Probably not a huge surprise to anyone, but that’s how the details of it play out. As always, if you have questions or want a deeper dive into something that I didn’t look at, please let us know and comment. And we’re always happy to take a closer look at something that’s near and dear to your hearts. Thank you so much.