This report presents national and subnational estimates of crime offenses and victimizations for violent and property crime. Findings in this report are based on the National Incident-Based Reporting System (NIBRS) Estimation Program, which collects detailed information on crime incidents reported to law enforcement throughout the United States. Key findings include that the rate of violent offenses decreased from 393.9 per 100,000 persons in 2023 to 370.8 per 100,000 in 2024, and the rate of violent victimization in 2024 was 376.9 per 100,000 persons, down from the 2023 rate of 401.1 per 100,000 in the U.S. In addition, males and females both had decreases in the rate of homicide victimization from 2023 to 2024. Lastly, the rate of property offenses decreased 9% from 2,019.7 per 100,000 persons in 2023 to 1,835.1 per 100,000 in 2024. The victimization rates for burglary and larceny-theft both decreased from 2023 to 2024.

Between 2000 and 2020, youth detention dropped by about 75%. Youth under 18 held in adult jails and prisons also fell by 84%, from 14,500 in 1997 to 2,300 in 2022. At the same time, juvenile arrests declined dramatically, showing that lower confinement has not made communities less safe. The report focuses on a very small subset of young people in the juvenile justice system who are both high risk and hard to reach, often called HR2 youth. In a mid-sized city, the report says this group may number no more than 25 young people. These youth often face overlapping challenges, including trauma, family instability, community violence, school disengagement, mental health needs, substance use and repeated system contact. They may not respond to standard community-based services, not because support does not matter, but because their needs are more intense and their daily lives are less stable. The share of juvenile delinquency cases involving violent crime index offenses or weapons possession rose from about 8% in 2015 to 13% in 2022. The share of juvenile arrests involving those offenses rose from about 8% in 2015 to 12% in 2024. Even so, the report stresses that most youth arrests and most detained cases still do not involve serious violence or weapons. The report also spotlights several programs with encouraging results. Choose to Change found that participating youth were 39% less likely to be arrested for a violent crime two years later. Roca’s Baltimore program found a 19% lower reincarceration rate for participants than for similar nonparticipants. Common Justice also reported that only 8% of responsible parties were terminated for new crimes and 78% of participants who exited the program graduated successfully.

Drawing on over a decade of longitudinal linked administrative and earnings records, this report examines earnings returns for City University of New York (CUNY) community college associate degree program entrants using selection-on-observables and individual fixed effects methods, distinguishing between terminal associate degree completion and pathways involving bachelor’s attainment, whether earned alone or in combination with an associate degree. Because degree completion is not random, estimated returns depend on the econometric assumptions underlying each approach. The authors pay particular attention to how returns vary across entry cohorts, major fields (as declared at entry), student demographic characteristics, and eligibility for Accelerated Study in Associate Programs (a program that provides intensive advising, financial support, and structured course-taking to help community college students enroll full-time and graduate on time) as well as how these returns evolve over time after graduation (within a 10-year post-entry follow-up period). The authors find substantial and robust earnings returns to associate degree completion for CUNY community college students across multiple estimation approaches and student subgroups. For example, after accounting for a wide range of factors -- including early academic performance and pre-college earnings -- the authors estimate substantial earnings gains associated with completing a terminal associate degree by Year 10. Specifically, terminal associate degree completers earned about $2,426 more per quarter (roughly $9,700 annually), representing an increase of about 30% compared to non-completers. Nearly as many community college entrants completed a bachelor’s degree as completed only an associate degree, and bachelor’s degree completers saw much larger annual returns—about $16,000 annually relative to non-completers. Although earnings trajectories vary with timing, demographics, and local labor market conditions, degree completion is consistently associated with improved long-run labor market outcomes.

Since the COVID-19 pandemic, students’ rising mental health needs, chronic absence, academic challenges, and struggles to reengage with school have spurred interest in whole child education and pushed practitioners and policymakers alike to reimagine what school can look like. Community schools are a strategy designed to address these issues, focused on simultaneously improving student wellbeing and expanding educational experiences and outcomes. Across the country, major investments in community schools are driving interest in how increased access to funding and the expansion of the strategy are affecting students and families. This is especially true in California, which has committed $4.1 billion to support the strategy in nearly 2,500 schools across the state. Located in southern Los Angeles County, Lynwood Unified School District (Lynwood) sits within a 4- by 4-mile area, serving 10,900 students across 17 schools (3 high schools, 2 middle schools, and 12 elementary schools). In 2024, the district received more than $24 million in CCSPP grant funds to expand beyond its pilot community school, Lynwood High School, established in 2019. Lynwood leveraged this funding to turn all remaining 16 schools into community schools, helping the district to advance its vision of equity and whole child support at the urgent pace demanded by the needs of students and families. This report found that Lynwood enabled successful scaling and implementation of its community schools by taking several steps. This included conducting a holistic districtwide analysis on what was being provided and what was needed, through analyzing various types of data and conducting climate surveys. The district also clearly defined the role of community school coordinators and built their capacity through offering routine professional development.

Strong evidence ties early language difficulties to later adjustment challenges. Little is known, however, about factors that exacerbate these associations. This study tests the hypothesis that unsupervised, solitary screen time amplifies longitudinal associations from low language skills to heightened socioemotional difficulties. The participants were 546 (264 girls, 282 boys) 4–5-year-olds attending 24 population-based childcare centers in 13 municipalities across Denmark. Teachers twice completed assessments of child adjustment difficulties (i.e., conduct problems and emotional problems), approximately six months apart. At the outset, teachers assayed child language abilities (i.e., communication skills and productive vocabulary) and parents reported solitary screen time (i.e., the amount of time children spent alone viewing handheld devices or television). Results indicated that solitary screen time and low communication skills predicted increases in subsequent emotional problems. Moderated associations emerged for conduct problems, such that solitary screen time exacerbated longitudinal associations from oral language problems to later adjustment difficulties. Specifically, among those with above (but not below) average levels of solitary screen time, low initial productive vocabulary and low initial communication skills predicted increases in conduct problems across the course of six months within a single school year.

Population growth slowed in a majority of the nation’s 3,143 counties and the District of Columbia between July 1, 2024, and July 1, 2025. Census Bureau data show that among the 2,066 counties that grew between 2023 and 2024, nearly 8 in 10 saw their growth slow or reverse direction in 2025. In many cases, counties already in decline saw losses accelerate. Meanwhile, 310 of the 387 U.S. metropolitan statistical areas (metro areas) had slower growth between 2024 and 2025 than during the prior year. The three metro areas with the steepest percentage point declines in population growth rates were along the U.S.-Mexico border: Laredo, TX (from 3.2% in 2023-2024 to 0.2% from 2024 to 2025); Yuma, AZ (3.3% to 1.4%); and El Centro, CA (1.2% to -0.7%). These shifts were largely due to lower levels of net international migration, which declined nationwide. Other key findings include that geographically, many of the fastest-growing counties were in states along the southeast coast of the United States in Florida, Georgia, South Carolina, North Carolina and Virginia. Among some of the largest metro areas, the fastest-growing counties tended to be on the outer edges, a pattern especially pronounced in Texas. Among counties with populations of 20,000 or more, nine of the top 10 fastest-growing counties were in the South, as were 45 out of the top 50.

The System of National Accounts (SNA) is the internationally agreed standard set of recommendations on how to compile measures of economic activity. The SNA describes a coherent, consistent and integrated set of macroeconomic accounts in the context of a set of internationally agreed concepts, definitions, classifications and accounting rules. The 2025 revision of the SNA recommends treating own-account data as an intangible capital asset. This study explores the impact of this recommendation on the sources of economic growth for the U.S. economy from 2002 to 2024. Researchers use experimental estimates for own-account data and databases to modify the Integrated Industry-Level Production Accounts (ILPA). The adjustments to the ILPA include changes on the output side of the accounts to capture new gross fixed capital formation. On the input side, data provides a capital service to all industries that use data. Researchers find that including own-account data as an asset raises the contribution of IT-related capital assets to gross domestic product growth by about one-third between 2002 and 2024, but the effects differ significantly across industries. The revised capital composition is rebalanced toward intangibles and digital technologies. Overall, treating data as an asset leads to faster economic growth, with a positive impact on value added, but lower measured total factor productivity gains in the aggregate. Impacts vary by industry, underscoring the need to account for industry heterogeneity in data production and use when assessing the effects of data on productivity.

In the United States, graduate medical education (GME) refers to the critical period of training after graduation from medical school when medical residents learn to provide patient care under the supervision of faculty members before entering autonomous clinical practice. There is little accountability in the current public financing model of GME. Longitudinal data concerning the inputs, as well as short- and long-term outputs, of the GME system are difficult to access, hindering federal policymakers and other public and private GME stakeholders from fully evaluating the GME system. This brief highlights the urgent need to develop, coordinate, and implement a concrete action plan to better measure medical student, resident, and physician performance and workforce composition over time and to improve the stewardship of GME funding in addressing societal needs. Researchers found that while there is a wealth of raw data on GME from various entities, definitions and collection methods may differ across the unconnected databases in which the data are housed. Researchers provide recommendations to address this issue, including convening an inclusive group of GME stakeholders to host a series of meetings to develop a set of core outcome metrics and guidelines for standardizing, systematizing, and sharing data relevant to GME, as well as to provide recommendations to implement best practices in data collection, storage, and usage and investing in longitudinal research on and tracking of individual health professional, program, and institutional outcomes on GME training.

The misuse of antipsychotic drugs in nursing homes has been a longstanding concern, particularly because these drugs can have a sedative effect and might be used as chemical restraints to control residents’ behavior. In addition, antipsychotic drugs pose an increased risk of death for elderly patients with dementia. In response to concerns about misuse, the U.S. Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) developed a quality measure—the percentage of residents given antipsychotic drugs—to track use of antipsychotic drugs in nursing homes. This quality measure factors into a nursing home’s star rating. This report assesses antipsychotic drug use in nursing homes. Researchers found instances of nursing homes inappropriately diagnosing residents with schizophrenia. Specifically, nursing homes inappropriately diagnosed residents with schizophrenia to mask the nursing homes’ misuse of antipsychotic drugs and to artificially inflate their star ratings. In addition, medical directors made inappropriate schizophrenia diagnoses to justify prescribing antipsychotic drugs. Researchers provided several recommendations to address the misuse of antipsychotic drugs in nursing homes, including expanding the use of data to monitor nursing homes’ use of schizophrenia diagnoses and target oversight, and increasing efforts to ensure that nursing home residents and their families are fully informed when antipsychotic drugs are given.

This study examined whether increasing sleep duration was associated with changes in daily affect, specifically, increases in positive affect and decreases in negative affect, among short-sleeping adolescents. During the initial preintervention week, average nightly sleep duration was 6.42 hours. In the experimental weeks, habitual sleep, or regular, long-term sleep pattern, averaged 6.22 hours, while sleep extension increased to 7.00 hours. This between-group difference represented a large effect confirming that the manipulation increased sleep duration. Morning positive affect increased significantly in both conditions. There were no significant differences in morning or evening affect between the sleep extension and habitual sleep conditions. The researchers concluded that increasing nightly sleep is feasible for short-sleeping adolescents and resulted in longer sleep duration. However, this did not lead to differences in between groups over the short intervention period, daily associations suggest that sleep may play a role in adolescents’ emotional experiences. Longer or more intensive sleep interventions may be needed to detect group-level changes in affect.