OPINION:
“It’s no accident that violent crime is near a record 50-year low,” President Biden says. Recent fact-checks at places like PolitiFact rate Mr. Biden’s statement as true.
On ABC’s “This Week,” when Sen. Tim Scott, South Carolina Republican, said, “Under Joe Biden, we’ve seen the greatest increase in violent crime in my lifetime,” host Jonathan Karl responded, “Actually, senator, as you probably know, the latest stats on violent crime and the murder rate show they’re actually down this past year.”
Other fact checks, such as by USA Today, have attacked former President Donald Trump for asserting that violent crime is increasing.
Those in the news media, such as ABC’s Mr. Karl, rely almost exclusively on FBI data to report on changes in crime rates. But there is strong evidence that FBI data is less reliable than in the past.
The U.S. has two different measures of crime. The FBI Uniform Crime Reporting program annually counts the number of crimes reported to police. The Bureau of Justice Statistics, by contrast, uses its annual National Crime Victimization Survey to ask 240,000 people a year whether they have been victims of crime. The survey, known as the NCVS, is used to estimate total crime, reported and unreported. The survey indicates that only 42% of violent crimes and 32% of property crimes were reported in 2022, the last year the NCVS data is available.
Since 2020, the FBI’s reported crimes and the NCVS’ total crimes have gone in opposite directions. For instance, between 2021 and 2022, the FBI reported a 2.1% drop in violent crime, but the NCVS showed an alarming increase of 42.4% — the largest one-year percentage increase in violent crime ever reported by the survey. The increase in 2022 over 2020 is slightly greater.
In saying Mr. Biden’s claim was correct, PolitiFact declared: “Other types of crime statistics, including the National Crime Victimization Survey, show current levels of violent crime far lower than their peaks in the early 1990s.”
But Mr. Biden was saying that the violent crime rate was near a 50-year low, not that it was lower than it was in the 1980s. There have been many years over the last 50 years where the violent crime figures from the NCVS are lower than in 2022. In addition, to say the violent crime rate increased by 42.4% in 2022 seems far from as low as it was in 2021 or 2020.
A more fundamental problem exists, however, for those relying on FBI data. The FBI and NCVS estimates of reported crimes have also gone in opposite directions since 2020. From 2008 to 2019, the FBI and NCVS measures of reported violent crimes generally tended to move up and down together. But from 2020 to 2022, these two numbers were almost perfectly negatively related to each other. Each time one measure of reported violent crimes rose, the other measure fell.
While the FBI’s number of reported violent crimes fell by 2% in 2021 and 2.1% in 2022, the NCVS’ measure showed increases of 13.6% and 29.3%, respectively.
It is puzzling enough that measures of reported and total crimes don’t match. But when even these two measures of the same thing — reported crime — are going in opposite directions, there are real concerns about the FBI data.
A frequently discussed concern with the FBI data is the decline in the number of police departments reporting crime after a new reporting system was used. In 2022, 31% of police departments nationwide, including Los Angeles and New York, didn’t report crime data to the FBI. That is better than 2021 but still much worse than the 97% of agencies covering most of the U.S. reported in 2020. In addition, in cities from Baltimore to Nashville, Tennessee, the FBI is undercounting crimes those jurisdictions reported.
Still, other problems exist. Police departments downgrading crimes can also explain the drop in the FBI numbers. Classifying an aggravated assault as a simple assault means that it will be excluded from FBI violent crime data, which doesn’t include simple assaults. The difference often involves whether the criminal used a weapon in committing an assault, but many radically left-leaning prosecutors refuse to include weapons charges against defendants. That could explain the difference between the two measures of reported crime because the NCVS will ask victims if the assault involved a weapon, even if the police reports ignore that characteristic of the crime.
District attorneys in New York, Chicago and Los Angeles, backed by liberal donor George Soros, are downgrading felonies to misdemeanors. Recent numbers show the progressive Manhattan District Attorney’s Office downgraded felonies to lesser charges 60% of the time, with 89% of the time they were downgraded to misdemeanors.
This isn’t a new problem. In the past, Chicago has intentionally misclassified homicides, instead labeling them as subject to noncriminal “death investigations.” The problem may be increasing, and police may also be responding to the decisions of prosecutors.
Over the last few years, as the number of police officers have been reduced due to budget cuts and retirements, police departments from Charlottesville and Henrico County, Virginia, to Chicago to Olympia, Washington, stopped responding to nonemergency 911 calls. Instead of police coming out, people can still go to the police station. There is the possibility that people think that calling 911 reports a crime, but a crime isn’t officially counted until police make a report.
Initial estimates cited by some news organizations show murder rates dropping 13% between 2022 and 2023 and have fallen still further in the first quarter of 2024. These numbers are still estimates. Murders are usually reported, but these initial estimates may be revised, and the large number of police departments not reporting this data may affect the FBI’s estimate. But while Mr. Biden and the news media point out the historically large drop last year, they ignore that 2022’s projected murder rate was still 5.51 per 100,000 people, or 7% above its 2019 level. The NCVS doesn’t measure murders, which make up about 1% of violent crimes.
News organizations rely on reported crime numbers without considering unreported crimes. The gap between the two reported crime measures provides strong doubts about the accuracy of the FBI’s reported crime data. Americans believe that crime is increasing as law enforcement is collapsing. They also say they report more crimes to the police, but that isn’t showing up in the FBI reports.
• John Lott is president of the Crime Prevention Research Center. He served as senior adviser for research and statistics in the Office of Justice Programs and the Office of Legal Policy at the Justice Department.
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