Upshot: This post offers graphs of the counts of violent crimes between January 2023 and January 2025, showing where the counts for January 2025 were relative to prior months.
In our last post, we looked at the counts of violent crimes in January compared to the previous month and the same month the year before as well as in comparison to the range of counts for each crime type going back to 2023.
In this post, we offer graphs to visually represent these changes. Each graph represents a “histogram” (a density plot) which shows how many months had crime rates within certain ranges. Superimposed on the histogram is a verticle line, which represents the count for January. The goal is to be able to look at the graph and, at a glance, see where the January crime count was relative to the range for the prior two years.
Data notes: The data for these graphs was collected by Emma Burnkrant and Jesus Romero, using the publicly available data on the HPD dashboard. In prior posts, we “froze” the data based on what we had collected each month, even though the data on the HPD dashboard fluctuates as new information comes in and their database updates. But since we now have research assistants, they kindly collected the more updated data, including recollecting data we had previously collected, but that would be less accurate given the fluctuations and updates to the live dataset. Those updated data are the source for these graphs.
What we see upon inspecting the graphs is the counts for January tended to be in the lower half of the range. We also want to look at where the bulk of the data are. The histograms tend to be fairly close to “normally distributed” meaning the peak is roughly in the middle or a little off-center from the middle. When the verticle line is to the left of the middle bulk, that means that January’s count was below average. In the case of sexual offenses, we see the line is in the highest bar, meaning the most common set of counts (6 months of the last 25 months have counts between 60 and 65). But since most of the data is still to the right, the January count was still less than average.
Summary: These graphs let us see what crime counts looked like over time and where things stand in the last month. As reported in our last post, January’s crime counts are generally lower than average, but still “in the distribution,” which is easier to see with these graphs.
The Hawaii Crime Lab 