How the Measures of Total Violent Crime and Reported Violent Crime Varied During the Biden and Trump Administrations

As we have pointed out many times, the U.S. Department of Justice has two measures of crime: the FBI measure of reported crime and the Bureau of Justice Statistics measure of total crime. The relationship between these two measures is quite shocking for the Biden administration, where the FBI’s reported measure indicates that crime fell, but the BJS’s measure of total crime shows an increase. The BJS numbers don’t include murder, but while murders are the most serious type of violent crime, they only make up about 1% of total reported violent crime.

BJS data from 2014 to 2018 (https://bjs.ojp.gov/document/cv23.pdf)

BJS data from 2019 to 2023 (https://bjs.ojp.gov/content/pub/pdf/cv18.pdf)