Jim Hartman
Over the past year major media left-leaning commentaries have insisted that crime rates are falling in the United States.
ABC’s David Muir asserted so when interjecting a “fact check” rebutting Donald Trump’s claim crime was up during his presidential debate with Kamala Harris.
Americans think crime is on the rise with a Gallup Survey in 2023 finding 92% of Republicans and 58% of Democrats are convinced crime is increasing.
Do people mistakenly or erroneously believe that it’s rising?
Muir and others based their claim on the FBI’s annual crime in the nation data for 2022, released in September 2023. It showed a 2.1% decrease in violent crimes compared to 2021.
Democrats and liberals in the media celebrated the FBI’s crime reduction data as evidence of a turning point on crime problems. It followed a crime wave in 2020 after defund-the-police protests and riots erupted nationally and with the pandemic’s stay-at-home orders disrupting daily living.
However, last month the FBI quietly updated its 2022 crime data to show an actual 4.5% increase in violent crime.
The new data documents a net increase of 80,029 violent crimes in 2022 over 2021. There were an additional 1,699 murders, 7,780 rapes, 33,459 robberies and 37,091 aggravated assaults that year.
Rather than a 2.1% drop in violent crime, there was a 4.5% increase, representing a 6.6% total swing in the FBI numbers.
The FBI crime data counts the number of crimes reported to police every year. In 2022, 31% of police departments nationwide, including Los Angeles and New York, didn’t report crime data to the FBI.
In addition, crimes reported to the police are falling because arrest rates are plummeting. If victims don’t believe criminals will be caught and punished, they won’t bother reporting them.
The U.S. has two measures of crime.
In addition to the FBI statistics, the Census Bureau administers the National Crime Victimization Survey that asks 230,000 U.S. residents annually whether they have been victims of crimes.
The HCVS report for 2023 found no statistical evidence that violent crime or property crime is dropping in America. The violent crime rate in 2023 was 19% higher than in 2019, the last year before the defund-the-police movement swept the country.
Crime hasn’t risen uniformly over the U.S. The crime spike has been concentrated in urban areas.
These are areas where far-left prosecutors have been elected, where police work is most heavily scrutinized, and where enforcement and prosecutions lag.
According to the NCVS, the urban violent-crime rate increased 40% from 2019 to 2023.
The urban property-crime rate is also getting worse, with an increase of 26% since 2019. This number excludes rampant shoplifting, as the NCVS is a survey of households and not of businesses.
In contrast, violent-crime rates in suburban and rural areas are essentially unchanged since 2019. Both suburban and rural areas measured statistically insignificant changes. The recent crime increase is limited to cities.
The NCVS findings are more reliable than the FBI. They capture crimes whether reported to the police or not and the FBI lacks data from a relatively large number of law enforcement agencies.
President Biden and Kamala Harris have touted that violent crime has dropped “to a near 50-year low” under their leadership, citing the original flawed FBI data.
But you don’t see many news accounts acknowledging the FBI data relied upon was wrong. Rather than a drop, there was really an increase in violent crime.
The FBI’s stealthy data update should remind us of when the Bureau of Labor Statistics overestimated the number of jobs created in the U.S. by 818,000 between March 2023 and March of this year.
Americans aren’t mistaken in their belief that crime is increasing, and that our cities have become more dangerous. Their perceptions are grounded in fact.
E-mail Jim Hartman at lawdocman1@aol.com.