Democrats cover up rise in violent crime with tricky statistics

“Make no mistake, violent crime has increased under Donald Trump,” warned Minnesota Governor Tim Walz in his first speech as Kamala Harris’s running mate.

“If you look this up at home,” Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg claimed last month, “you'll know that crime went down under Biden and went up under Trump. Why would America want to go back to the higher crime we saw under Donald Trump?”

But the opposite is true: Between 2016 and 2020, violent crime fell by 17 percent under Trump – and rose by 43 percent under Biden from 2021 to 2022.

Of course, news agencies regularly claim that Americans are wrong when they believe there is an increase in violent crime.

On Monday, Axios headlined as usual: “New data shows violent crime falling sharply in major U.S. cities.”

Or from NPR earlier this year: “Violent crime in the United States is declining rapidly – ​​even if Americans don’t believe it.”

But Democrats and the media do not understand the difference between the number of crimes reported to the police and the in total Number of crimes.

There are two measures of crime: one, the FBI's NIBRS, counts the number of crimes reported to the police each year.

The other study, the National Crime Victimization Survey of the Bureau of Justice Statistics, asks about 240,000 people each year whether they have been victims of crime in order to measure both the reported And unreported crimes.

Since 2020, these two measures have been strongly negatively correlated: The FBI has found fewer cases of crime, but people respond at the same time in larger Figures that prove that they have become victims.

We know that victims of crime only report about 40% of violent crimes and 30% of property crimes to the police.

Before 2020, the FBI and NCVS numbers were generally used together.

But since 2020, these numbers have moved in opposite directions every year.

For example, the FBI reported a 2.1% decrease in violent crime in 2022, but the NCVS showed an alarming increase of 42.4% – the largest one-year percentage increase in violent crime ever reported by this measure.

One reason for this is the collapse of law enforcement in the United States.

Take, for example, cities like New York with more than 1 million inhabitants.

FBI data shows that arrest rates for reported violent crimes in these cities have fallen by more than half, from 44% in the five years before the Covid pandemic to just 20% in 2022 – the largest drop ever.

But this is because since 2020, criminals have had a decreasing risk of being arrested when committing crimes.

In 2022, in cities with more than a million residents, only 8% of all violent crimes (reported and unreported) and 1% of all property crimes resulted in an arrest—and of course, not all of those arrests resulted in charges, let alone prosecutions or convictions.

“It has gotten to the point where people don’t even bother reporting crimes because they think nothing will happen,” Elon Musk rightly noted in his conversation with former President Trump on Monday evening.

Since the pandemic, police departments have lost many capable officers through retirements. Some police forces are demoralized because the criminals they arrest are immediately released.

To make matters worse, since the reporting system was changed in 2021, less than half of all police departments provide the FBI with complete crime data.

Therefore, it is not surprising that the reported crime rate and the total crime rate are moving in opposite directions. Shockingly, the NCVS indicator for reported crime has been moving in the opposite direction of the FBI indicator since 2020.

One reason for this gap may be the reduction in the number of police officers due to budget cuts and retirements. In some areas, police no longer respond to non-emergency calls, forcing victims to drive to the police station to report a crime.

A call to 911 is not enough – a crime is only officially counted in FBI data if the police have filed a report.

Some critics focus on the change in the murder rate in recent years and claim that the publicly perceived increase in crime is a mirage.

Although the murder rate fell by 13% in 2023, the preliminary murder rate for 2023 is still 7% higher than the 2019 level.

But the FBI's data on the murder rate could also be incorrect: the figures from the US health authority Centers for Disease Control (CDC) do not match those of the FBI.

While the FBI shows that the murder rate peaked in 2020 and declined in both 2021 and 2022, the CDC records a peak in 2021 – and remained high in 2022, higher than 2020.

We know that victims do not report most crimes to the police.

Therefore, it makes no sense to rely on the FBI's limited data – unless the goal is to downplay America's crime problem.

John R. Lott Jr. is President of the Crime Prevention Research Center.