Who to Believe About Crime Data

An article by Hans Bader in Liberty Unyielding raises questions about the reliability of government reported crime data.  The article cites statistics compiled by UCLA PhD and former Harvard Professor John Lott which indicate that prior to the Biden administration, the annual FBI Uniform Crime Reports (UCR) tracking reported crime in the U.S. and the separately conducted National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS), which interviews roughly 240,000 Americans about crimes committed against them,  complemented each other by indicating similar trends in criminal activity.  But, as Lott notes, after 2020,

“they’ve diverged sharply: The FBI reports fewer crimes, while more Americans say they’ve been victimized. Unreported crime was always a factor . . . . Another factor appears to have skewed the FBI data: the breakdown of law enforcement in this country. When people believe police won’t catch or prosecutors won’t punish criminals, they’re simply less likely to report crimes. Between 2010 and 2019, victims reported 63.3% of violent crimes to police. In the last three years, that number plummeted to 48.8%. Arrests fell as well–from 26.5% before COVID-19 to just 16.6% afterward.”

With the exception of murder, the NCVS indicated significant increases in violent crime from 2020 to 2024 with rape and sexual assault up 67%, robbery up 38% and aggravated assault up 62%.  By contrast, over the past four years the UCR has reported declines in violent crime.  Some of the additional factors causing this divergence include:

“Many big-city police departments, such as D.C., have reclassified serious offenses, apparently in an effort to make the streets seem safer than they are. Downgrading aggravated assaults to simple assaults removes them from the FBI’s violent crime statistics, for example. Whether an attack counts as “aggravated” often depends on whether a weapon was used – but many progressive district attorneys now refuse to pursue weapons charges. That difference matters because the NCVS asks victims directly whether a weapon was involved, even if police reports omit it.

Progressive prosecutors in cities like New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles have also made a habit of reducing felony charges. In Manhattan, for example, the district attorney’s office downgraded felonies 60% of the time.”

After the George Floyd/Black Lives Matter riots in the spring of 2020 which inspired many blue states and big cities to cut police budgets, shorten sentences and install liberal/progressive District Attorneys, who refused to prosecute most criminals, noone should have been surprised that reported crime would decline while actual crime would increase.  The takeaway from this is clear, removing the consequences for crime encourages more crime.  The impact of restoring tough prosecutors locally and removing woke politicians and policies from federal law enforcement coupled, hopefully, with a national movement to restore increased sentences for repeat felons, should begin to impact crime data over the next two years.

Sadly, for the thousands who will become crime victims over that period the turnaround will not come soon enough.