Did crime rise under Trump and Fall under Biden?
“The false message of the RNC was that [illegal immigration] was leading to an increase in crime.” Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg claimed on Fox News Sunday. “If you look this up at home, you will know that crime went down under Biden and crime went up under Trump. Why would America want to go back to the higher crime we experienced under Donald Trump?”
“And make no mistake, violent crime was up under Donald Trump,” Democrat Governor Tim Walz warned in his first speech as Kamala Harris’ running mate. “That’s not even counting the crimes he committed. You know, some of us, some of us are, some of us, some of us in here are old enough to remember”
“It’s no accident that violent crime is near a record 50-year low,” President Biden claimed.
In fact, the opposite is true: between 2016 and 2020, violent crime fell by 17% under Trump and soared by 43% under Biden between 2020 and 2022. The problem is people don’t understand the difference between the number of crimes reported to police and the total number of crimes.
There are two measures of crime. The FBI’s NIBRS counts the number of crimes reported to police yearly. The Bureau of Justice Statistics uses its National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS) to ask about 240,000 people each year whether they have been victims of crime to measure reported and unreported crime. Since 2020, these two measures have been highly negatively correlated. The FBI has been finding fewer instances of crime, but people are simultaneously answering in greater numbers that they have been victims.
The National Crime Victimization Survey data is available here.
https://bjs.ojp.gov/document/cv22.pdf
https://bjs.ojp.gov/content/pub/pdf/cv21.pdf
https://bjs.ojp.gov/sites/g/files/xyckuh236/files/media/document/cv20.pdf
https://bjs.ojp.gov/content/pub/pdf/cv18.pdf
https://bjs.ojp.gov/content/pub/pdf/cv17.pdf
https://bjs.ojp.gov/content/pub/pdf/cv16re.pdf
. https://bjs.ojp.gov/content/pub/pdf/cv15.pdf
