There is a crime emergency in our country, and misleadingly using statistics to cover it up endangers us all.
Misunderstanding what the crime statistics measure and hiding the rise in crime
‘T he false message of the RNC was that [illegal immigration] was leading to an increase in crime,” Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg claimed on Fox News Sunday. “If you look this up at home, you will know that crime went down under Biden and crime went up under Trump. Why would America want to go back to the higher crime we experienced under Donald Trump?”
A Gallup survey last November showed that 92 percent of Republicans and even 58 percent of Democrats believed that crime was rising. In a series of surveys from March last year to April this year, Rasmussen Reports finds a remarkably constant percentage of Americans who believe that violent crime is getting worse — 60 percent to 61 percent. Roughly four times as many people think violent crime is rising rather than getting better.
News outlets keep claiming that Americans are wrong to believe that crime is rising. But Americans aren’t mistaken.
If you defund the police so arrest rates plummet and people give up reporting crime, then crime statistics can look good even as chaos ensues.
Americans in many parts of the country see that products at CVS or Walgreens stores are behind glass, that they must call a clerk to unlock the glass and then wait while reading and examining the different packages. People know this is costly and something other than what the companies would prefer to do, but they have no choice. Americans also know that things were not like this a few years ago.
Property crime isn’t the only type of crime that is increasing. Violent crime has also gone up.
Those who say crime is falling rely on the FBI’s National Incident-Based Reporting System (NIBRS). But the problem is that the FBI data only count crime that is reported to police, not total crime, and even then, the FBI does a poor job of measuring reported crime.
There are two measures of crime. The FBI’s NIBRS counts the number of crimes reported to police each year, but the Bureau of Justice Statistics uses its National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS) to ask about 240,000 people each year whether they have been victims of crime. Since 2020, these two measures have been highly negatively correlated. The FBI has been finding fewer instances of crime, but people are simultaneously answering in greater numbers that they have been victims.
There are several reasons for this difference, but a simple one is that law enforcement has collapsed. If people think criminals won’t be caught and punished, they are less likely to report crime to the police. Using the FBI data, if you compare the five years preceding Covid-19 with 2022, the percentage of urban reported violent crimes resulting in an arrest fell from 44 percent to 35 percent. And among cities with more than 1 million people (where most reported violent crime occurs), arrest rates plunged by more than half, from 44 percent to 20 percent. There has never been a similar drop in FBI data.
Criminals face few risks when committing crime. In 2022, in cities with more than a million people, only 8 percent of all violent crimes (reported and unreported) and 1 percent of all property crimes resulted in an arrest. Of course, not all those arrests resulted in charges, let alone prosecutions or convictions.
In large cities, the arrest rate in 2022, compared with the average from 2015 to 2019, fell by 38 percent for murders, 50 percent for rapes, 55 percent for aggravated assault, and 58 percent for robberies. As police budgets were cut and a large number of police retired, police concentrated their limited resources on the most serious crimes, particularly murder.
As mentioned above, since 2020, the numbers for FBI’s reported crimes and the NCVS’s total (reported and unreported) crimes have gone in opposite directions. For instance, in 2022, the FBI reported a 2.1 percent drop in violent crime, but the NCVS showed an alarming increase of 42.4 percent — the largest one-year percentage increase in violent crime ever reported by the NCVS. The increase in 2022 over 2020 is slightly greater.
It is puzzling enough that reported and total crime measures don’t match. But a more fundamental problem exists for those relying on the FBI data. The FBI’s and NCVS’s reported crime estimates 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 correlated to each other (-0.9599). 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 percent in 2021 and 2.1 percent in 2022, the NCVS’s measure showed increases of 13.6 percent and 29.3 percent, respectively. 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 and a possible explanation for part of the discrepancies is the decline in the number of crimes reported by police departments after a new reporting system was introduced in 2021. In 2022, 31 percent of police departments nationwide, including in Los Angeles and New York, didn’t report crime data to the FBI. Another 24 percent of departments only partially reported data. So fewer than half of police departments reported complete data in 2022. That is better than 2021 but still much worse than the 97 percent of agencies covering most of the U.S. reported in 2020. In addition, in cities from Baltimore to Nashville, the FBI is undercounting crimes those jurisdictions reported.
Still other problems exist. The downgrading of crimes by police departments 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 DAs are refusing to include weapons charges against defendants. That could explain the difference between the two measures of reported crime, because the NCVS will ask victims whether the assault involved a weapon, even if the police reports ignore that characteristic of the crime.
Progressive district attorneys nationwide, from New York to Chicago to Los Angeles, are downgrading felonies to misdemeanors. Recent numbers show that Manhattan’s progressive DA downgraded felonies to lesser charges 60 percent of the time; and, of that 60 percent, 89 percent were downgraded to misdemeanors. That isn’t a new problem. In the past, Chicago has intentionally misclassified murders, instead labeling them as subject to noncriminal “death investigations.” However, the problem may be increasing, and police may also be responding to the decisions of prosecutors.
Over the past few years, as the number of police has fallen because of cuts in budgets and a slew of retirements, police departments nationwide from Charlottesville and Henrico County, Va., to Chicago to Olympia, Wash., 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 officially counts only once police make out a report.
Much is made of the drop in murder rates over the past few years. Murder rates dropped by 13 percent in 2023, though the preliminary 2023 murder rate is still 7 percent above 2019 levels. The NCVS doesn’t survey its respondents about murder, but the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) has a measure that doesn’t match up with the FBI data. While the FBI shows murder peaking in 2020 and dropping in 2021 and 2022, the CDC shows it peaking in 2021 and higher in 2022 than in 2020 (2022 is the latest year that the CDC data are available).
Inevitably, the crime statistics have become a campaign issue, with the Trump campaign highlighting the NCVS data while “fact-checkers” either ignore the NCVS data or assert that the FBI NIBRS data are more believable.
But those who want to use the FBI NIBRS data face a puzzle. If the FBI data show that arrest rates are crashing, why is reported crime falling? The drop in arrest rates makes much more sense with rising crime rates. People also say that they are reporting more crimes to the police, but that isn’t showing up in the FBI reports. The fact that the FBI data are inconsistent with both the Bureau of Justice Statistics and CDC data should also raise concerns.
Even if the media want to rely solely on the FBI, they must acknowledge the plummeting arrest rates.
It’s baffling why anyone would want to look at only reported crimes rather than total (reported and unreported) crimes when we know that victims don’t report most crimes to the police.
There is a crime emergency in our country, and misleadingly using statistics to cover it up, as Mayor Pete does, endangers us all.