Urban Violent Crime Surged 40 Percent Beginning in 2019

The further removed we are from the presidential debate, the clearer it is that ABC’s David Muir’s “fact-checking” of former President Trump’s remarks on surging crime was outrageous.

In insisting that “the FBI says overall violent crime is coming down in this country,” Muir relied on FBI statistics that, at best, showed a marginal one-year drop — down 3 percent nationwide from 2022 to 2023. Even if the bureau’s numbers were arguably reliable, such a reduction would be negligible. In reality, though, the FBI’s numbers are not reliable. And most significantly, Muir ignored the trajectory of the past five years, which tells a dramatically different story in major American cities — almost uniformly run by Democrats.

There, violent crime has, indeed, surged.

Jeffrey Anderson led the Justice Department’s Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS) during Trump’s administration. Unlike Muir, he is a reliable source, both on overall trends and the flaws of FBI crime-statistic reporting — beginning with the rudimentary fact that the bureau is an investigative agency, not a statistical agency.

Writing in the City Journal, Anderson explains that if we start with 2019 — right before the radical Left’s George Floyd riots and the toxic combination of the defund-the-police movement and the Progressive Prosecutor Project of non-enforcement policies — and then run the numbers through 2023, there was “a whopping 40 percent surge in urban violent crime” (emphasis added). During the same timeframe, urban property crime increased by 26 percent.

Anderson is relying on the BJS’s National Crime Victim Survey. The NCVS is a Nixon-era crime measuring tool. It is the gold standard because it grapples with the fact that most crime — probably about 55 percent — goes unreported. By searching for victims, rather than recording only crimes that are reported to the police, it provides a more accurate depiction.

By contrast, the FBI does not just miss unreported crime; it has been struggling since 2021 (the first year of the Biden-Harris administration, amid the crime surge) to implement a new crime-reporting system. Many police agencies do not report their crime data. According to the Marshall Project, for example, 40 percent of agencies did not report in 2021, and 31 percent did not report in 2022. Compliance has improved; still, as Anderson notes, only 85 percent of police of agencies provided data in 2023.

Even when it obtains reported-crime data, moreover, the FBI produces internally contradictory results. Murder is the easiest crime to account for. Yet, as Anderson relates:

The FBI’s press release announcing the agency’s 2021 crime numbers declared that there had been 22,900 murders that year, a 4.3 percent increase from 2020. Today, however, the [FBI’s Uniform Crime Reporting Program’s] “Source Data” claims that there were 21,462 murders in 2021 — a 4.7 percent decrease from the prior year [emphasis in original]. Apparently, over 1,400 murders went missing between the time the FBI issued that initial press release and today. Moreover, the agency’s Data Discovery Tool lists the 2021 homicide total at 19,563 — more than 3,000 shy of the originally released tally.

Similarly, Anderson explains that, for a single, straightforward question — How many violent crimes were committed nationwide in 2020? — the FBI has provided four different answers, ranging from 1,272,812 (in its “source data”) to 1,326,600 (in a 2022 crime data press release — a figure that drops to 1,304,574 if one resorts to the bureau’s “Data Discovery Tool”).

Anderson takes pains to observe that the FBI is not up to anything nefarious. Again, statistics-keeping is not its main focus (as it is BJS’s), it is transitioning its methodology, it gets incomplete data, and even the data it gets — reported crime — omit most crime, which is unreported.

Thanks to my pal Scott Johnson at Powerline, I was tipped to this three-and-a-half minute video Jeff Anderson did for Fox News. It’s worth your time.