The FBI doesn’t receive individual reports of crimes, rather, they aggregate the crime statistics reported by thousands of law enforcement agencies who, for ease of comparison, share a common reporting format.
This gives us a bird’s eye view of national and state crime statistics, albeit with a lot of errors and omissions. Still, the data is useful as it gives policymakers, law enforcement, and researchers a statistical mechanism to compare crime in different jurisdictions.
Though the 2023 UCR data has not yet been released, Attorney General Merrick Garland has been offering snippets of data comparing crime in the first quarters of 2023 and 2024 that indicate a drop in crime. This begs the question: how can he know first quarter 2024 statistics, yet not release 2nd, 3rd, and 4th quarter 2023 statistics?
Other researchers and organizations are reporting a drop – at least in homicides. Jeffrey Asher has collected and compiled homicide statistics directly from 277 US cities who post their crime reports on departmental or city websites. He concludes that homicides have dropped 17.6 percent from 2023 to 2024. The Major Cities Chiefs Association tracks violent crimes in 70 US cities and reports a 17 percent drop in homicides in the first half of 2024.
Why we have so much 2024 data and none federally published for 2023 remains a question.
The media offers little clarity as they simply regurgitate incomplete statistics with almost no useful analysis.
ABC News presidential debate moderator David Muir corrected former President Trump regarding crime during the recent September 10th debate when he said, “as you know, the FBI says overall violent crime is coming down in this country.” To which Trump replied, “They didn’t include the cities with the worst crime! It was a fraud!”
“President Trump, thank you,” said Mr. Muir, before moving on.
Muir and Trump are actually both right. Insofar as the FBI statistics are woefully incomplete it allows people to draw their own opposing conclusions.
CBS News reporter David Pogue offered his version of crime in the United States, reporting that crime has been declining for 30 years. This ignores, of course, the nationwide increase of the last few years that are illustrated in one of his own charts and thoughtfully omitted in another.
The shooting of San Francisco 49er Ricky Pearsall in San Francisco’s Union Square led SF Chronicle news director Demian Bulwa to write: “Homicides are down so far that they may set a new low in the modern era — back to at least ’85.”
In effect, Bulwa went back to the crime ridden 1980s to find a statistic high enough to crawl under. California Department of Justice data shows that 2022 homicides were the highest in eleven years and, with the exception of a few outliers, amongst the highest in 23 years.
If one goes far enough back in time, humankind was indeed a more violent species.
Dr. Steven Pinker, in his exhaustive study of human violence, The Better Angels of our Nature, wrote that ancient man had a 25 percent probability of dying violently, while today that number is a fraction of a percent. In a similarly exhaustive report of immigrant crime, Stanford researcher Dr. Ran Abramitzky reports that from 1960 to 2020, immigrant crime and incarceration runs below that of the native-born US population. I wonder what he would say about the period from 2020 to 2024 when the US shifted to a virtually open borders immigration and asylum system?
Muir, Pogue, Bulwa, and even Pinker and Abramitzky are essentially making an “I walked to school and home both ways uphill in the snow“ statement, offering a subterfuge for what has become a politically acceptable level of crime.
What matters to crime victims is what is happening in their own communities today. Their voices can be heard through the recently released Bureau of Justice Statistics annual National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS). The NCVS reports that nationally: “From 2022 to 2023, there were no significant changes in the rates of specific violent crime types.”
And yet, the news that crime didn’t get much worse when averaged across all victim demographics and crime categories hid some alarming statistics. Violence against women increased, as did black victimization. In fact, the rate of violent crime committed against black victims increased by a shocking 23.39 percent. Property crimes also increased mostly due to motor vehicle theft.
In California, homicides are up from 1,739 in 2018 to 1,892 in 2023, an increase of 8.7 percent. And while there was a drop from 2021 to 2023, it should be noted that 23 cities and counties failed to provide crime statistics in 2023, resulting in an undercount of at least 100 murders.
Where there is little actuarial controversy are the increasing number of non-fatal gunshot victims in California. In 2018, there were 17,908, increasing by 63 percent to 29,179 in 2023. Many of those victims are non-fatal victims of crime sprees or mass shootings. They are the murder victims who didn’t die.
In California “immigrant” crime is a factual unknown as law enforcement is prohibited from collecting immigration or citizenship information as the result of SB 54 or the California Values Act, which was passed in 2017. Yet today, 28 percent of CDCR prison inmates were not born in the United States, although this is not reflective of their immigration status at the time of admission to state prison. Abramitzky’s methodical national statistical analysis has little to do with California or perhaps the other border states most affected by immigration.
One can evaluate crime across the millennia as Pinker did, or the last 150 years as Abramitzky did, or the last 50 as Bulwa did, or the last 30 as Pogue did, or the last 6 months as Muir did. But it won’t make much difference to voters today. People and most of all crime victims understand what they see and what they experienced and in 2022 those were: 15,047 homicides, 541,280 aggravated assaults, 102,947 rapes, 150,107 robberies and 5,049,721 property crimes in one year to name just a few.
To most Americans that is unacceptable.
Steve Smith is a senior fellow in urban studies at the Pacific Research Institute, focusing on California’s growing crime problem.
