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Editorial: We Should Invest In Better Crime Data

After a spike in both violent crime and property offenses after the pandemic-and-protest year of 2020, statistics show that crime is reverting to 2019 levels. Still, that has not stopped former president  Donald Trump from claiming “crime is rampant and out of control like never before,” and doubling down on that alarmist message by telling the Republican National Convention that “our crime rate is going up.” Politicians exploit fears about crime, and the public is often ready to believe the worst. Twenty-three out of 27 Gallup polls conducted since 1993 showed that at least three-fifths of American adults believed crime had risen over the previous year, though annual rates actually fell during most of that period. But while public opinion will probably never precisely reflect statistical reality, the government should be able to provide accurate, monthly national crime statistics, the Washington Post editorial board argues. 


The FBI’s new incident-reporting platform, intended to improve data quality, has made it more time-consuming and complex for police departments to send information to Washington. It has proven especially difficult for small, local agencies, nearly half of which have 10 or fewer officers on staff. As a result, only around two-thirds of the country’s agencies were using it to report incidents as of 2021. Recently, participation in the new system has increased, including large cities such as New York and Los Angeles. The CCJ predicts that it will cover 83 percent of the population this year. Still, it will take money and effort to reach 98 percent by 2027, as the CCJ recommends. The Bureau of Justice Statistics gets less money from Congress than almost any other federal statistical agency. Last fiscal year, the bureau received $35 million, far less than the $78 million President Biden had requested and less than the $42 million it received the year prior. The Bureau of Labor Statistics, by contrast, received $698 million. Private groups such as CCJ do important work with their limited resources, as its latest report on crime trends, despite unavoidable data limitations, shows. Keeping citizens fully informed about crime is a public responsibility, however. It deserves public resources to match.

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A daily report co-sponsored by Arizona State University, Criminal Justice Journalists, and the National Criminal Justice Association

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