by John R. Lott Jr.
‘Crime went down under Biden, it went up under Trump,’ Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg said taken over on Fox News Sunday. “Why Would America Want to Return to the Higher Crime We Experienced Under Donald Trump?”
“It is no coincidence that violent crime is nearing a 50-year low,” President Biden said similarly taken over. And fact checkers in places like PolitifaktRate Biden’s statement as “true.”
For months, the news media has relied on FBI data to continually push this claim. The problem is that the FBI data only counts crimes reported to police, not overall crime, and even then, it doesn’t do a good job of measuring reported crimes.
Buttigieg challenged viewers to “do yourselves a favor and check the data.” But Buttigieg either doesn’t understand crime data or really hopes Americans won’t take up the challenge.
There are two different crime measures. The FBI’s National Incident-Based Reporting System program annually counts the number of crimes reported to police. The National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS) asks 240,000 people a year whether they have been victims of a crime. The NCVS estimates the total number of crimes, both reported and unreported. The survey results show that only 42 percent of violent crimes and 32 percent of property crimes were reported to law enforcement in 2022, the most recent year for which NCVS data is available.
Buttigieg didn’t claim that reported crime was down. He claimed that crime was down.
Politifact found Biden’s claim to be correct decided: “Other types of crime statistics, including the National Crime Victimization Survey, show that the current level of violent crime is significantly lower than the peaks of the early 1990s.” But Biden said the violent crime rate is near its lowest point in 50 years, not lower than it was in the 1990s. There have been many years over the past 50 years when the NCVS violent crime data was lower than it was in 2022. Furthermore, the finding that the violent crime rate increased by 42.4 percent in 2022 after a smaller enhance in 2021 seems a far cry from the 2020 lows.
Unreported crimes have increased as law enforcement has collapsed, reducing the rate at which crimes are reported to police. In cities with more than a million residents (where violent crimes are disproportionately common), arrest rates for violent crimes have fallen from 44 percent in the five years before COVID-19 (2015-2019) to 20 percent in 2022. Arrest rates for property crimes have fallen even more.
As of 2020, the FBI’s reported crimes and NCVS’s total crimes are negatively correlatedFor example, in 2022, the FBI reported a 2.1 percent decline in violent crime, while the NCVS showed an alarming enhance of 42.4 percent – the largest annual percentage enhance in violent crime ever recorded by the NCVS.
It is sufficiently curious that the measures of reported and total crime do not agree. But the FBI and NCVS estimates reported crime also went in opposite directions from 2020. From 2008 to 2019, the FBI and NCVS rates of reported violent crime generally tended to rise and fall at the same time. However, from 2020 to 2022, the two numbers were almost perfectly negatively related to each otherEvery time one rate of reported violent crime increased, the other rate decreased.
While FBI-reported violent crimes declined by 2 percent in 2021 and 2.1 percent in 2022, the NCVS measures showed increases of 13.6 percent and 29.3 percent, respectively.
The fact that the FBI and NCVS reported crime rates are moving in opposite directions raises real concerns about the FBI data.
So even if Buttigieg wanted to claim that reported crimes have gone down, that’s a moot point.
A much-discussed issue with FBI data is the decline in police department reports following the implementation of the fresh system. In 2022, 32 percent of police departments did not report CRIME data to the FBI. Another 24 percent only partially reported itAs a result, less than half of departments reported full crime data.
Police departments that downgrade crimes further distort the FBI’s statistics. Classifying aggravated assault as elementary assault means it will be excluded from the FBI’s violent crime data, which does not include elementary assaults. The difference often relates to whether the offender used a weapon in the assault, but many radical left district attorneys refuse to consider weapons charges against defendants. That may explain the difference between the two measures of reported crime. After all, the NCVS asks victims whether the assault involved a weapon, even if police reports ignore that feature of the crime.
District Attorneys Backed by Soros New York Down Chicago Down Angels created other biases in the FBI data by downgrading felonies to misdemeanors. The latest numbers show that Manhattan’s progressive district attorney downgraded felonies to lesser charges 60 percent of the timeIn eighty-nine percent of cases, the potential felonies were reduced to misdemeanors.
This is not a fresh problem. In the past, Chicago has deliberately misclassified murders by wrongly labeling them as non-criminal “death investigations.” However, the problem may be growing, and police may also be responding to prosecutors’ decisions.
Over the past few years, as the number of police officers has declined due to retirements and budget cuts, police departments have stopped responding to 911 calls in places like: Charlottesville, ChicagoAND Olympia, WashingtonInstead of police coming to the scene of a crime, people can still go to their local police departments. People may think they have reported a crime by calling 911, but the crime is not officially counted until the police file a report.
There has been a lot of talk about the decline in murders over the past few years. Murders fell by 13 percent in 2023, although the preliminary murder rate for 2023 is still 7 percent above 2019 levels. The NCVS does not survey its respondents about murders, but the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) has a measure that does not match the FBI data. While the FBI shows that murders peaked in 2020 and declined in 2021 and 2022, the CDC shows that they peaked in 2021 and were higher in 2022 than in 2020.
The FBI data does not match the NCVS or CDC data. The huge difference between these measures, even when they measure the same thing, should raise earnest questions about the accuracy of the FBI’s reported crime data. People say they are reporting more crime to the police, but it does not show up in the FBI reports.
Americans living in our nation’s urban centers know that crime is increasing and law enforcement is decreasing.
– – –
John R. Lott Jr. is a RealClearInvestigations contributor focusing on voting rights and gun rights. His articles have appeared in publications such as the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, Los Angeles Times, New York Post, USA Today, and the Chicago Tribune. Lott is an economist who has held research and/or teaching positions at the University of Chicago, Yale University, Stanford, UCLA, Wharton, and Rice.
Photo “Pete Buttigieg” by Pete Buttigieg. Background photo “ICE Arrest” by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).
