New Bureau of Justice Statistics Crime Data Just Released: Violent crime (Rape, Robbery, and Aggravated Assault) Soaring Under Biden-Harris.
The list of people in the media claiming that crime is falling is endless.
DAVID MUIR: President Trump, as you know, the FBI says overall violent crime is coming down in this country
David Muir, “Harris-Trump presidential debate transcript,” ABC News, September 10, 2024.
TRUMP: Criticizing the Biden administration: “Crime is through the roof.”
THE FACTS: In fact, FBI data has shown a downward trend in violent crime since a coronavirus pandemic spike. Violent crime surged during the pandemic, with homicides increasing nearly 30% in 2020 over the previous year — the largest one-year jump since the FBI began keeping records Violent crime was down 6% in the last three months of 2023 compared with the same period the year before, according to FBI data released in March. Murders were down 13%. New FBI statistics released in June show the overall violent crime rate declined 15% in the first three months of 2024 compared to the same period last year. One expert has cautioned, however, that those 2024 figures are preliminary and may overstate the actual reduction in crime.
In fact, the 2020 crime wave has been receding for the past two years. Violent crime dropped in 2022 and 2023 and, according to preliminary data, is on track for another steep drop in 2024. The FBI’s Quarterly Uniform Crime Report for the first quarter of 2024 reported that overall violent crime decreased by 15 percent nationally compared to the first quarter of 2023.
Debate moderators cited the FBI numbers, but Trump does not consider them reliable. “They were defrauding statements,” Trump shot back. “They didn’t include the cities with the worst crimes. It was a fraud. . . .
“The FBI defraud. They were defrauding statements. They, they didn’t include the worst cities. They didn’t include the cities with the worst crime.”
— Trump
This is false. Violent crime rates, especially for homicide in large cities, have fallen sharply during Biden’s presidency, after a surge during the pandemic. The violent crime rate is believed to be near its lowest level in 50 years.
Trump has a point that the quarterly data released in June by the FBI is incomplete — not every law enforcement agency reports its data on time or accurately for the report — but he’s wrong to suggest crime is worse today than at any time in American history. Jeff Asher, a crime analyst and consultant, maintained a dashboard that compiles crime statistics, and it shows the murder rate declining significantly, year over year, in many major cities. Overall, there have been nearly 18 percent fewer murders in 277 cities, according to Asher. . . .
President Biden and Vice President Harris also passed the most significant gun reform law in almost 30 years. And now, we’re seeing the results of that action. Violent crime has plunged to its lowest ever in almost 50 years.
And today, Axios reported, “Ne- — new preliminary data from major U.S. cities shows that homicides were down during the first full six months of President Biden’s last year in office — more than 70 percent in some places — compared to the same time of President Trump’s — Trump’s last year.”
The historic declines in crime mean that America is safer, and we remain focused on building on this progress. . . .
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The just-released data from the Bureau of Justice Statistics’s National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS) shows violent crime has soared under Biden-Harris. If you look at rape, robbery, and aggravated assaults (the NCVS doesn’t measure murder), between 2016 and 2020, violent crime fell by 15% under Trump and soared by 55% under Biden between 2020 and 2023. The year before they became president and then how it had changed by the either the end of Trump’s president or the latest year for Biden-Harris. Even if you take the starting period for Biden as 2019 or the five-year average before COVID because the numbers may have been artificially depressed during COVID, violent crime rose by 19% (see graph below).
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Under Biden, rape soared by 42%, robbery by 63%, and aggravated assaults by 55%.
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If you pick 2021 as the base year for comparison for Biden-Harris, though that makes them responsible for any changes that have already occurred during the first year of their presidency, the numbers are virtually unchanged, with the exception of aggravated assault, which is up much more under this measure. Violent crime is up 55%, rape up 42%, robbery up 53%, and aggravated assault up 67%.
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David Muir, as well as the rest of the media, and the Democrats, want to look at the FBI’s data on reported crime (their final data for 2023 isn’t out yet). But we know people don’t report most crimes to the police and that the change in total crime seems much more relevant to people’s experience than the change in reported crime.
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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 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, though the final FBI data isn’t out yet for 2023. The FBI has been finding fewer instances of crime, but people are simultaneously answering in greater numbers that they have been victims.
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Unfortunately, the media doesn’t seem to understand the difference between the number of crimes reported to police and the total number of crimes. In addition, as we have pointed out, there are also problems with the FBI’s measure of reported crimes (see here, here, and here). For example, in 2022, 31% of police departments had stopped reporting crime data to the FBI, including the departments in three of the five most populous cities (New York, Los Angeles, and Phoenix). Another 24% of police departments only partially reported crime data. Thus fewer than half of police departments reported complete crime data to the FBI. The Washington Post fact-check quoted above says that Trump is wrong to claim that the FBI is missing many large cities where most of the violent crime is occurring, but even the Marshall Project points out the large number of missing police departments in the FBI data.
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The Washington Post is the only recent discussion that even mentions the NCVS.
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To back up Trump’s claims of rising crime, his campaign likes to point to the 2022 National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS), a household survey of respondents age 12 and older. For the period of July 2021 to November 2022, it showed a sharp increase in violent crime and an unusual discrepancy with the FBI reports, which are crimes reported to 80 percent of the nation’s law enforcement agencies by the public. As a household survey, the NCVS is incomplete. It does not include people who are homeless or in institutions such as prisons, jails and nursing homes; it also does not include crimes against people younger than 12. The victimization survey also excludes murders.
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- The preliminary data for 2023 indicates that 21% of police departments didn’t report crime data to the FBI, but we don’t yet know how many only partially reported data. In 2022 where we have more information, it was 31% that didn’t report any data. Plus, they missed that another 24% only partially reported the data.
- There are multiple reasons for the number of reported crimes to be falling. Arrest rates have plummeted to unprecedented levels. If you insist on relying on the FBI data, in large cities, over one million in 2022, the arrest rate for REPORTED violent crime fell to 20%. The arrest rate for reported property crime fell to 4.5%. Also, in many parts of the country, people now have to come down to the police station to get a crime report filled out. They used to send out police cars to do that. There are other reasons.
- As far as not everyone being covered by the NCVS, most crime victims do not report crime to the police, so the FBI is missing a lot of victims — victims only report around 40% of violent crime and 30% of property crime. It is the whole reason we have the NCVS. Plus, the NCVS, just like the Census, tries to get groups such as illegal aliens who are well known not to report crime to police.
- Finally, murders make up about one percent of violent crime, so their changes won’t appreciably alter the change reported here for overall violent crime. On top of that, while the NCVS doesn’t measure murder, the CDC measures homicides and legally justifiable homicides. While the FBI showed murder peaking in 2020 and falling in 2021 and then more in 2022, the CDC shows that murder (homicides minus legally justifiable homicides) was higher in 2022 than in 2020.
- The FBI data is thus inconsistent with both the BJS’ NCVS and the CDC’s data.
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Other discussions that we have had comparing the FBI data to the BJS’ NCVS are here, here, here, and here.
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)
