The Department of Justice (DOJ) said in March that crime dropped across the country in the final three months of 2023, compared with the same period in 2022, including a 13 percent drop in homicides.
Attorney General Merrick Garland heralded the data in a statement as evidence that its federal violent crime reduction strategy was yielding results.
However, some crime data analysts are skeptical of the FBI’s reporting, saying the agency’s statistics are estimates based on flawed and incomplete data, which lowers the value of its conclusions and comparisons.
While the FBI highlighted a short-term drop in the most serious crimes, three other organizations—the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Council on Criminal Justice, and the Major Cities Chiefs Association—underlined the five-year trend: the number of homicides and other violent crimes is still far above where it was in 2019.
It’s worth noting that overall crime in America today is far lower than it was in the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s. But in 2020, the total number of offenses skyrocketed to a peak not seen in recent years.
In a contentious election year, public opinion polling shows that Americans of all political stripes are more concerned about crime now than they have been at any point in the last 20 years.
Moreover, the discrepancies between the FBI’s official assessments and the conclusions drawn from other national sources are leading some Republicans to question whether political motives at the Biden administration’s DOJ are influencing the reporting of federal crime statistics.
In a recent interview with Time magazine, former President Donald Trump said the FBI’s crime statistics are “fake numbers.”
“It’s a lie. It’s fake news,” President Trump said of FBI statistics showing a decrease in crime. “The FBI fudged the numbers.”
Sean Kennedy, the executive director of the Coalition for Law, Order, and Safety, told The Epoch Times that the FBI hasn’t received sufficient data to inform its national crime statistics since changing the way the data is collected and reported in 2021.
“The FBI numbers aren’t cooked,” Mr. Kennedy told The Epoch Times. “They’re half-baked. It’s not good data going into the process.”
Reliability of FBI Data
The FBI’s Uniform Crime Reporting Program was founded in 1930 and collects data from more than 18,000 law enforcement agencies across the country. The agency says the program’s purpose is to provide reliable information for criminologists, the media, and the public.In 2021, the FBI began to require local law enforcement agencies to start reporting using a more detailed system. In a report he co-authored and published in April, Mr. Kennedy, who is also the policy director at the nonprofit Law Enforcement Legal Defense Fund, said the shift from a simple reporting system to a complicated one caused many departments to simply not report.
According to a report by the Coalition for Law, Order, and Safety, only 63 percent of the nation’s police departments, covering 65 percent of the U.S. population, sent in data in 2021. In 2019, 97 percent of the population was covered.
Jeff Asher, a crime data analyst and the cofounder of AH Datalytics, told The Epoch Times that the reporting increased significantly in 2022 when the FBI allowed police departments to submit data using the bureau’s less detailed system, too.
That move, Mr. Asher said, raised overall participation to greater than 93 percent. Participation in the new reporting system increased to 70 percent. Nevertheless, the lack of buy-in to the new reporting system raises questions about the validity of the national crime reports in 2021 and 2022.
“In some ways, the 2022 numbers are irrelevant,” Mr. Asher said. “We’re getting closer to where we were in 2020 and 2019 before the switch was made; we’re not quite there yet.”
Mr. Asher said the FBI’s full-year crime data for 2023 will likely be published in October. The quarterly figures, published three months after the end of a quarter, are typically revised in a full-year report.
Mr. Kennedy said the quarterly figures should be viewed skeptically. Some agencies reporting to the FBI send data quarterly, while others only send it annually. Moreover, some data is complete, some is incomplete, some is in the old format, and some is in the new format.
“It’s like Swiss cheese then with an estimation model filling in gaps to get to aggregate totals for national, or state, or jurisdiction level figures,” Mr. Kennedy said.
William Sabol, a former director of the DOJ’s Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS), said he still thinks the FBI’s numbers are a trustworthy snapshot of crime in America for a specific period. However, the lack of consistent reporting from year to year makes statistical comparisons more difficult.
Mr. Sabol worked at the BJS from 2006 to 2016. He served as its acting director from 2013 to 2014 and then as its director from 2014 to 2016.
“A simple comparison between this year and last year that doesn’t take into account these [changes] that have been occurring over the past few years doesn’t seem to me to give a fair assessment of how crime has been changing,” Mr. Sabol told The Epoch Times.
Nevertheless, Mr. Asher said the FBI’s crime data flaws are not a new phenomenon. What’s more important for both criminologists and the public is examining the short-term and long-term trends.
“The data has always been flawed. It’s not uniquely flawed in 2023 or 2022, so the exact figures are going to be wrong,” Mr. Asher said. “Quibbling over the specific numbers is kind of a fool’s errand.”
Cooking the Books?
As for malfeasance—deliberate manipulation of the figures to make crime appear as though it is dropping—Mr. Sabol, now a professor at Georgia State University’s Department of Criminal Justice and Criminology, said those accusations have dogged the Uniform Crime Reporting Program since its inception.“The allegation is one thing,” Mr. Sabol said. “I don’t know what the evidence is.”
Mr. Kennedy said there are documented instances of police departments deliberately underreporting in an effort to show progress in fighting crime. His group’s report highlighted a systemic effort by the Los Angeles Police Department to downgrade serious crime to minor offenses between 2005 and 2015.
Mr. Sabol said the issue of underreporting crime lies with local police departments and the communities they serve. Undercounting affects national crime statistics.
Some police departments may not be getting an accurate count of crime data because they cannot find proof a crime took place after a citizen reported an incident, Mr. Sabol said. Additionally, some people don’t bother reporting a crime at all.
The DOJ, Mr. Sabol said, attempts to get a better idea of what he called the “dark figure” of underreported or unreported crime via a national poll called the National Crime Victimization Survey.
The Pandemic Crime Spike
Overall trends suggest that crime in America as a whole is dropping from a peak in 2020 but isn’t yet below where it was in 2019.In the past five years, FBI statistics and other sources indicate all crime peaked in 2020 during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. The same year saw the nation beset by unprecedented restrictions of movement and sometimes violent protests following the May 2020 death of George Floyd in police custody.
The FBI defines violent crime to include murder and non-negligent manslaughter, rape, aggravated assault, and robbery. Property crime includes burglary, breaking and entering, larceny-theft offenses, and motor vehicle theft.
The other primary federal measure of crime maintained by the Bureau of Justice Statistics, the National Crime Victimization Survey, showed the rate of violent victimization in 2022 rose to 23.5 per 1,000 people aged 12 and older. That number is up from the near 30-year low of 16.5 per 1,000 set in 2021.
The Bureau of Justice Statistics says that its survey is designed to collect “information on threatened, attempted, and completed crimes and on crimes reported and not reported to police.”
By comparison, the Coalition for Law, Order, and Safety’s report focused on what it called the most severe crimes: homicide, aggravated assault, auto theft, and carjackings.
The coalition’s report used nationwide data from the FBI and the CDC as well as smaller data sets collected by the Council on Criminal Justice and the Major Cities Chiefs Association to conclude that these major offenses rose significantly from 2019 through 2023.
The council observed a 25 percent to 37 percent increase in homicides between 2019 and 2022.
Aggravated assaults were up between 10 percent to 29 percent. Auto theft rose between 26 percent to 45 percent. Carjackings increased between 103 percent to 173 percent.
Mr. Kennedy said the FBI’s numbers don’t match up with the data coming from non-governmental sources. The agency, he said, is making estimates based on incomplete reporting, and it is not getting data from every big city.
Because of its extrapolation, he said, the FBI is “injecting errors into their national data.”
“The FBI has managed to disappear crimes, creating the apparent appearance of a larger decline than there actually was,” Mr. Kennedy told the Epoch Times. “That, sort of, has created this narrative that crime is somehow down to the pre-COVID level. But it’s not; it’s actually significantly higher.”
Mr. Kennedy emphasized examining what he calls a growing reporting gap between the FBI’s national reporting of homicides and the CDC’s. In 2022, the CDC counted nearly 3,500 more homicides than the FBI.
Mr. Kennedy said there is a distinction between murders and homicides, but he feels the comparison is apt if certain caveats are considered.
The CDC defines homicide as a death resulting from injuries inflicted by another person with the intent to injure or kill by any means. That means it excludes justifiable homicides, police killings, and war deaths.
The FBI, he said, reports murder as a combination of violent killing and non-negligent manslaughter.
Legally, there is a distinction. But both events, he said, are a violent death caused by another person.
A police organization that collects data directly from the 70 largest police departments in the country shows that serious crimes—murder and rape—have risen significantly over the past 10 years.
The Major Cities Chiefs Association, a professional organization of police executives representing the largest cities in the United States and Canada, observed an increase in crime across the categories it tracks: homicide, rape, robbery, aggravated assault, and non-fatal shootings.
Changes From 2022 to 2023
While an exact comparison of the FBI’s 2022 to 2023 full-year statistics is currently impossible, one private organization uses a representative sample to gauge crime trends in the United States.The Council on Criminal Justice, a nonprofit group, conducts an annual study based on data it collects on crime across 38 major U.S. cities. The largest is New York and the smallest is Syracuse, New York.
The council’s annual study agreed with the FBI’s initial assessment that crime is down from 2022 to 2023. But, like other sources, it said that, compared with 2019, crime in America is still elevated.
“Crime rates are largely returning to pre-COVID levels as the nation distances itself from the height of the pandemic, but there are notable exceptions,” the council’s 2023 report states. “There were 18 percent more homicides in the study cities in 2023 than in 2019.”
The council tracked 12 categories of crime and compared the amounts from 2023 to 2019. Five categories were up, and the rest were down.
Motor vehicle theft and carjackings more than doubled in 2023 compared with 2019. Residential burglary had the most significant decline, falling by 26 percent.
A private, nationwide analysis conducted by Mr. Asher’s firm was most in line with the FBI’s findings.
According to crime data collected and published by AH Datalytics, Mr. Asher observed a significant drop in the number of murders between 2023 and 2022. His firm’s data also suggests a more minor dip in overall violent crime during the same period.
“[2023] probably places the violent crime rate at or below, likely below, where it was in 2019,” Mr. Asher said.
Property crime, Mr. Asher said, also fell slightly. However, the 2023 property crime figures are skewed by the surge of auto thefts related to vulnerabilities in cars manufactured by Kia and Hyundai. AH Datalytics, so far in 2024, is seeing murder continuing to trend downward.
According to real-time numbers published by the firm covering 202 American cities, 1,774 murders had occurred as of April 10. That is a nearly 20 percent drop from the 2,206 murders the company observed during the same period in 2023.
Crime Down Sharply Over Past 40 Years
Federal and local data indicates crime is down significantly from where it was in the past.Both Mr. Asher and Mr. Sabol said criminological research shows crime in the United States reached its highest recent point in the early 1990s and has declined precipitously since then.
In a 2004 edition of the American Economic Association’s Journal of Economic Perspectives, Steven Levitt, the William B. Ogden Distinguished Service Professor of Economics at the University of Chicago, assessed crime trends from 1950 through 2000.
In the mid-1970s, early 1980s, and early 1990s, the number of homicides exceeded 9 per 100,000. Between 1980 and 1991, the number hovered between 8 to 10 per 100,000, Mr. Levitt observed.
According to FBI statistics published in 2012, looking back over the prior decade, the number of violent crimes and property crimes dropped significantly between 1992 and 2011. Violent crimes dropped to about 1.2 million from more than 1.9 million, and property crimes fell to about 9.1 million from about 12.5 million.
One stark example of the long-term trend is easily visible in New York.
Why Crime Rates Change
The hardest thing about making comparisons of crime trends over time, Mr. Sabol said, is that there is no good baseline year to start at with what could be called an average amount of crime.This, he said, allows people on the left to pick a comparison in the far past and cheer crime being down, while people on the right pick a more recent date and decry the rise in crime.
Mr. Levitt identified four reasons he thought contributed to the massive decline in crime over the last three decades of the 20th century. There are more police on the street, higher prison populations, the recession of the crack cocaine epidemic of the 1980s, and the Roe v. Wade decision in 1973.
Mr. Sabol said national politicians and federal government officials are largely incorrect when they assert that their individual efforts will substantially affect the crime rate.
Federal programs used to hire more police officers, which can affect the amount of crime in a given community, he said. Nevertheless, most of the police budget typically comes from local taxpayer funds.
“The levers that the federal government has are pretty small to affect [crime],” Mr. Sabol said.
Mr. Kennedy attributed the recent uptick in crime to three main factors: fewer cops on the street, fewer criminals going to jail, and prosecutors that pursue progressive political ends.
“The overall impact of these collective and individual decisions has emboldened criminals, overstretched the criminal justice and law enforcement system, and left offenders free to victimize innocent citizens across the country, and undermine public faith in the justice system,” the Coalition for Law Order and Safety report said.
Americans Are Concerned
With crime likely still elevated but not at its highest levels ever, public opinion research shows people are exceptionally worried about public safety.According to Pew, in 2024, 68 percent of Republicans, 58 percent of independents, and 47 percent of Democrats said the government should prioritize fighting crime. That’s an increase of 13 percent for Republicans, 11 percent for independents, and 8 percent for Democrats from 2021.
In terms of demographics, Black Americans and Americans over the age of 65 are most likely to say the government should work harder to fight crime.
Moreover, Americans said they are more worried than ever about getting their car stolen or broken into, being carjacked, mugged, or murdered. Gallup started asking the question in 2000.
Finally, 28 percent of Americans said someone in their household had been a victim of a crime in 2023. Again, it was a record-high reading for the survey that began in 2000.
Lydia Saad, Gallup’s director of U.S. social research, in November 2023 assessed Americans’ sense of security from crime.
“Whether because of sharp increases in violent crime during the pandemic or media coverage of other crimes, Americans’ sense of security from crime has been rattled in recent years.”
