by John R. Lott Jr.
“Crime went down under Biden, and crime went up under Trump,” Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg claimed on Fox News Sunday. “Why would America want to go back to the higher crime we experienced under Donald Trump?”
“It’s no accident that violent crime is near a record 50-year low,” President Biden similarly claimed. And fact-checkers, at places like Politifact, rate Biden’s statement as “true.”
For months, the news media has relied on FBI data to relentlessly push this claim. But the problem is that the FBI data only counts crime reported to police, not total crime, and even then, it does a poor job of measuring reported crime.
Buttigieg dared viewers to “do yourself a favor and look up the data.” But Buttigieg either doesn’t understand the crime data or he is really hoping that Americans don’t take him up on his dare.
There are two different measures of crime. The FBI’s National Incident-Based Reporting System program annually counts the number of crimes reported to police. The National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS), by contrast, asks 240,000 people a year whether they have been victims of a crime. The NCVS is used to estimate total crime, both reported and unreported. Survey results indicate that only 42 percent of violent crime and 32 percent of property crime were reported to law enforcement in 2022, the last year the NCVS data is available.
Buttigieg didn’t claim that the reported crime fell. He claimed that crime went down.
In saying Biden’s claim was correct, Politifact declared: “Other types of crime statistics, including the National Crime Victimization Survey, show current levels of violent crime far lower than their peaks in the early 1990s.” But Biden was saying that the violent crime rate was near a 50-year low, not that it was lower than it was in the 1990s. There have been many years over the last 50 where the violent crime data from the NCVS is lower than in 2022. In addition, to say the violent crime rate increased by 42.4 percent in 2022 after a smaller increase in 2021 seems far from the low it was in 2020.
Unreported crime has increased as law enforcement has collapsed, and that has reduced the rate at which people report crimes to police. In cities with more than one million people (where violent crime disproportionately occurs), arrest rates for violent crime plunged from 44 percent in the five years preceding COVID-19 (2015-2019) to 20 percent in 2022. Property crime arrest rates dropped by even more.
Since 2020, the FBI’s number of reported crimes and the NCVS’s number of total crimes have been negatively correlated. For instance, in 2022, the FBI reported a 2.1 percent drop in violent crime while the NCVS showed an alarming increase of 42.4 percent – the largest one-year percentage increase in violent crime ever recorded by the NCVS.
It is puzzling enough that measures of reported and total crime don’t match. But the FBI’s and NCVS’s estimates of reported crime have also gone in opposite directions since 2020. From 2008 to 2019, the FBI and NCVS measures of reported violent crime generally tended to move up and down together. However, from 2020 to 2022, these two numbers were almost perfectly negatively related to each other. Each time one measure of reported violent crime rose, the other measure fell.
While the FBI’s number of reported violent crimes fell by 2 percent in 2021 and 2.1 percent in 2022, the NCVS’s measure showed increases of 13.6 percent and 29.3 percent, respectively.
The fact that the FBI and NCVS measures of reported crime go in opposite directions raises real concerns about the FBI data.
So even if Buttigieg wanted to claim that reported crime went down, that is even debatable.
A frequently discussed concern with the FBI data is the decline that occurred in police department reporting after a new system was implemented. In 2022, 32 percent of police departments didn’t report CRIME data to the FBI. Another 24 percent only partially reported it, so less than half of departments fully reported crime data.
Police departments downgrading crimes further biases the FBI numbers. Classifying an aggravated assault as a simple assault means that it will be excluded from FBI violent crime data, which doesn’t include simple assaults. The difference often involves whether the criminal used a weapon in committing an assault, but many radically left-leaning district attorneys are refusing to include weapons charges against defendants. That could explain the difference between the two measures of reported crime. After all, the NCVS asks victims if the assault involved a weapon, even if the police reports ignore that characteristic of the crime.
Soros-backed district attorneys from New York to Chicago to Los Angeles have created other biases in the FBI data by downgrading felonies to misdemeanors. Recent numbers show that the progressive Manhattan DA downgraded felonies to lesser charges 60 percent of the time. Eighty-nine percent of the time that would-be felonies were downgraded, they were downgraded to misdemeanors.
This isn’t a new problem. In the past, Chicago has intentionally misclassified murders by mislabeling them as non-criminal “death investigations.” However, the problem may be growing, and police may also be responding to the decisions of prosecutors.
Over the last few years, as police ranks have thinned due to retirements and budget cuts, police departments have stopped responding to non-emergency 911 calls in places such as Charlottesville, Chicago, and Olympia, Washington. Instead of police coming out to crime scenes, however, people can still go down to their local police stations. People may think that they reported a crime by calling 911, but a crime isn’t officially counted until police make a report.
Much is made of the drop in murder rates over the last few years. Murder rates dropped by 13 percent in 2023, though the preliminary 2023 murder rate is still 7 percent above 2019 levels. The NCVS doesn’t survey its respondents about murder, but the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) has a measure that doesn’t match up with the FBI data. While the FBI shows murder peaking in 2020 and dropping in 2021 and 2022, the CDC shows it peaking in 2021 and higher in 2022 than in 2020.
The FBI data doesn’t match the NCVS or CDC data. The gigantic gap between these measures, even when they are measuring the same thing, should raise major doubts about the accuracy of the FBI’s reported crime data. People say that they are reporting more crimes to the police, but that isn’t showing up in the FBI reports.
Americans in our country’s urban centers know that crime is increasing as law enforcement is collapsing.
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John R. Lott Jr. is a contributor to RealClearInvestigations, focusing on voting and gun rights. His articles have appeared in publications such as the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, Los Angeles Times, New York Post, USA Today, and Chicago Tribune. Lott is an economist who has held research and/or teaching positions at the University of Chicago, Yale University, Stanford, UCLA, Wharton, and Rice.
Photo “Pete Buttigieg” by Pete Buttigieg. Background Photo “ICE Arrest” by Immigration And Customs Enforcement (ICE).
