Unpacking the truth: California’s reforms and crime data accuracy
In recent years, the debate surrounding criminal justice reforms in California, has sparked significant discussion. A recent paper by the Center for Juvenile and Criminal Justice claims that reforms such as Proposition 47 have led to a substantial decrease in property crime rates, citing a 53% reduction since 1995 and a 13% decline in Part I property crimes from 2009 to 2023. While the paper shows real data on reported crime, their analysis is oversimplified and missing several important details, presenting potential flaws in their argument.
Today, I was excited to see that the organization was hosting a webinar to discuss their report findings, and I was eager to join so I could gain some clarification regarding the details behind the data. During the introduction, they stated that the purpose of the webinar was to facilitate an open discussion regarding some of the “lies” and “false narratives” going around California. Ironically, it seemed like they were picking and choosing questions that would serve their particular statements. Most of the questions I submitted went unanswered, and they eventually resigned to closing the chat and wrapping up a few minutes early because they were getting “too many questions.” While it may be true that they received so many questions that they had difficulty addressing them all, I found it interesting that several other questions, both before and after my own, were discussed, and that they were so willing to end the webinar a few minutes early if they had such an engaged audience.
During the webinar, CJCJ spokespeople discussed how the rising crime rate is a lie and warned people against false narratives. Ironically, the CJCJ report (and all of their reports, really) does spin a narrative. Historically, CJCJ reports lack attention to detail, engage in selective reporting, and leave little room for assessing context to make the data look a certain way. They don’t want to just discuss the data, they want to tell a story, and evoke emotion from people. Even the title of the report, “Stop Lying About California,” has an aggressive tone that is unmistakably crafted to induce strong emotions: In my understanding, this is one of the most effective ways to “spin a narrative.”
On the first page, a figure shows the property crime rates in California from 1995 through 2023. The figure reveals that overall property crime rates in California have fallen by 53% since 1995 and 13% between 2009 and 2023. Of course, CJCJ uses this talking point to argue in defense of Public Safety Realignment, Proposition 47, Proposition 57, and basically any type of policy that they like that has been implemented between 1995 and now. They heavily imply that such reforms caused the decrease in crime, despite the fact that the sharpest crime drop occurred between 1995 and 2000, well before any of those policies were implemented.
They then explain that 2023 crime statistics are “inflated,” giving two reasons why. First, they explain that the COVID-19 pandemic and related restrictions accompanied reductions in property crime, therefore creating a “rebound effect” as the state reopened in 2022 and 2023. Second, they explain that the FBI’s gradual phase-in of incident-based crime reporting via NIBRS “allows agencies to report multiple arrests or offenses within a single incident (such as a theft that occurred during an assault), thus boosting numbers for lesser crimes such as property and drug offenses. California agencies have been slowly phasing in the NIBRS, which increased crime and arrest numbers for 2021, 2022, and 2023.”
The explanation regarding NIBRS confuses me, though, for two reasons. First, the data used for the figure to which they are referring was pulled from the California Department of Justice’s open data portal, which actually does not allow agencies to report multiple offenses during one incident. In fact, the California DOJ’s Open Justice data portal relies on the hierarchy rule (page 2, para. 2), which only tabulates the most serious offense per incident.
Further, even when they do look at NIBRS data (on a subsequent page), they don’t seem to grasp the fact that many California agencies haven’t reported to NIBRS at all. Toward the end of the report, they make a claim that “downward trends are continuing into 2024, with declines in nearly every crime category.” This particular claim is supported by numbers that the authors pulled from the FBI’s Uniform Crime Report rather than California DOJ data. They state that the data shows a major decrease in nearly every category when comparing the first three months of 2024 to the first three months of 2023, including a “11% decline in theft and a 17% decrease in burglary.” But this particular data is only based on 48 California cities, which don’t even cover some of California’s most major cities.
According to NIBRS participation data, which can be downloaded via the Crime Data Explorer, only 39% of California agencies reported to NIBRS in 2021, and these agencies represented only 28% of California’s population. In 2022, 68% of California agencies reported, which only represented 52% of California’s population. This is certainly an improvement, but still not ideal. A closer look at the FBI’s most recent quarterly crime data shows that several major California cities remain missing, including Los Angeles (population of 3.8 million), San Jose (970,000), San Francisco (809,000), and Oakland (436,504), to name a few. At present, the only large California cities that are contributing to NIBRS are San Diego (population of 1.3 million), Sacramento (529,000), Fresno (547,000), Long Beach (444,000), and Bakersfield (413,000).
During the webinar, I entered a question asking how NIBRS adoption has contributed to inflated numbers for California’s low-level offenses, despite the failure to report by many major California agencies. They acknowledged my question by explaining the hierarchy rule, but didn’t mention anything about California’s low NIBRS participation. I sent in another question to clarify that I wasn’t asking about the hierarchy rule, but about California’s participation specifically. This question was ignored.
In the CJCJ report, the authors briefly touch on the issue of federal estimates, stating that: “FBI quarterly crime tabulations, while not a complete picture of crime even for cities, have proven predictive of statewide trends in the past.” This is a half-truth. The methods used to estimate crime rates are fairly robust and can be accurate, but they have their limitations as well. The Bureau of Justice Statistics calculates NIBRS crime estimates using confidence intervals, which report ranges of potential values. This range gets wider and wider when the uncertainty is greater. It’s not that the intervals are wrong; they’re just not precise. Generally speaking, as the number of agencies reporting to NIBRS increases, the corresponding level of uncertainty in the estimates decreases. But in states like California, where the number of reporting agencies was rather low, these estimates are going to have a wide range for error. In fact, the FBI actually developed a precision-based suppression rule, wherein data is not released for some subgroups if the estimate is not precise enough. This was the case in a 2022 report released by the FBI that compared NIBRS estimates across different states in 2020 and 2021. When looking at the data tables, nearly all of the estimates are suppressed for California, in addition to some other states. To learn more about how this affects our ability to understand crime data, check out my previous post on the topic.
In conclusion, while the CJCJ presents compelling statistics, the narrative they craft often oversimplifies and selectively interprets data to support specific policy positions. Despite their claims of transparency and openness, the webinar demonstrated a tendency to avoid inconvenient questions and overlook crucial aspects of the data. This raises concerns about the reliability of their conclusions and underscores the need for a more nuanced and comprehensive analysis of crime trends and reform impacts. As the debate over criminal justice policies continues, it is essential for all stakeholders to critically evaluate the data, acknowledge its limitations, and strive for a balanced understanding that truly reflects the complexities of crime and public safety in California.
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