“President Trump, as you know, the FBI says overall violent crime is coming down in this country,” ABC News’s David Muir told Trump in the recent presidential debate. Whether or not violent crime is “coming down” depends on when you start measuring it. Crime is down from last year, and down significantly from the bad old days of the 1990s, but it is only now returning to pre-pandemic levels. The “coming down” measure also hinges on how crime is reported, and that’s not nearly so scientific a matter as the public might believe, writes the National Review's Jim Geraghty in the Washington Post. During thel debate with Vice President Harris, Trump argued that “the FBI — they were defrauding statements. They didn’t include the worst cities. They didn’t include the cities with the worst crime. It was a fraud.”
Trump was partially correct; there’s no reason to think the FBI statistics are deliberately fraudulent, but large gaps and inconsistencies in the collection of data mean the numbers aren’t offering a complete picture. In 2021, Miami-Dade, New York City and Los Angeles did not submit their data under a new reporting system. The stumbling transition meant big variations in the number of law enforcement agencies that participate year by year. In 2020, 16,572 of 18,641 participated. (88 percent). The following year, when the new system was required, saw a big drop in participation: just 13,344 of 18,939 (70 percent). The next year, 2022, brought a rebound, with 16,100 of 18,930 participating (85 percent). The FBI counts only crimes that are reported to the police. Quite a few victims of violent crimes never call the cops. The National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS) collects a nationally representative sample of about 240,000 people in about 150,000 households. Despite widely cited FBI statistics about a surging homicide rate during the pandemic years of 2020 and 2021, the NCVS data also indicates that violent victimizations overall were actually lower than in the following years — 16.4 per 1,000 people age 12 or older in 2020, and 16.5 in 2021. Getting a grip on what’s happening with crime is considerably more difficult than politicians and government officials (and journalists) tend to acknowledge. Has the rate of violent crime declined a little in quite a few corners of the nation? Probably so. That’s good news, but it might prove illusory if an increasing number of Americans don’t see any point in telling the police that they’ve been the victim of a crime, Geraghty says.
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