Whether crime is going down or if changes in reported crime statistics simply reflects lower reporting patterns is a critical challenge for evaluating crime trends. Underreporting can obfuscate crime stats locally and explored whether it’s occurring nationally. We know that underreporting isn't driving the large decline in murder that we've seen in 2023 and 2024, but what about other crimes that are less likely to be reported? Another way to approach the issue is to look at the National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS). The biggest contribution that the NCVS makes to the public discourse (IMO) is that it quantifies how frequently people do not report major crimes to the police, crime analyst Jeff Asher writes on his Substack. The share of people saying they reported their violent crime to the police fell from 46 percent in 2021 to 42 percent in 2022 while property crime reporting rose slightly from 31 to 32 percent.
This seems to strongly suggest that a smaller share of violent crime victims are reporting the crimes to the police, but the case is not quite as open and shut as the initial table makes things seem for a few reasons. NCVS is a survey and 2021 was an especially difficult year to survey with COVID and whatnot. The 2021 survey was made even more difficult because the survey's questioning stretched back to the second half of the preceding year. Looking deeper at the last few years shows that 2021’s 46 percent violent crime reporting rate was higher relative to recent years. The reporting rate for violent crimes in 2022 (41.5 percent) was higher than what showed up in NCVS 2019 and 2020 (40.9 and 40.2 percent respectively). The 2022 report isn’t the outlier, 2021 is the outlier. As to whether violent crime is being reported less often now than in recent years, the evidence we do have points to ‘no’. But, as with most crime data, the data is imperfect enough that the question cannot be answered with total certainty.
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