Crime is down - but mainly on paper.
Democrats and their allies in the liberal media (also known as “the media”) are seizing on the latest data out of the FBI, which appears to show that America’s crime wave is cooling off.
After denying all the evidence that there was a crime wave in the first place, they’ll apparently all tacitly acknowledge there was one so they can pretend to take credit for ending it.
But as you’d expect, there’s much more to the story.
As the Washington Examiner’s Mark Morgan and Sean Kennedy reported:
The FBI’s preliminary 2023 data show murder declined by 13.2% across the country and violent crime dropped 5.7% compared to 2022 levels. But these latest figures warrant skepticism, as we outline in a new report. In fact, violent crime is up substantially from 2019 levels, and last year’s apparent drop is less significant than it appears.
As Morgan and Kennedy explain, we have incomplete data, and much of the problem stems from how police departments report offenses to the FBI. In 2019, 89% of police agencies covering 97% of the population submitted data to the FBI - but by 2021 this fell to fewer than 63% of departments overseeing 65% of the population. This happened as law enforcement agencies were asked to transition to a system they’d used for decades to a newer one (the National Incident-Based Reporting System, or NIBRS).
Some cities, such as Chicago, Los Angeles, and New York City, failed to submit any crime data at all. The FBI has been relying on “estimations” to fill the gaps in reported data (also known as “making it up”).
That method of inferring offense totals is based on similar jurisdictions and past trends but is prone to error since it cannot compensate for local factors or events. For example, comparing Baltimore’s 2015 homicide total to similar cities’ trends would produce a skewed result. Baltimore, beset by riots and a police stand-down, saw murder rise 62% that year. In peer cities, murders rose in Cleveland only 15% and fell in Detroit by 1% and Memphis by 4%.
And the figures the agencies do report to the FBI do not match the agencies’ publicly reported figures. For Baltimore, the FBI reported 225 murders in 2023, but the city reported 262 — which means the FBI left out 37 murders. In Milwaukee, the police department reported a 7% increase in robberies, but the FBI showed a 13% drop. Nashville’s own data tallied more than 6,900 aggravated assaults in 2023, but the FBI counted only 5,941, leaving almost 1,000 of those offenses “missing.” This trend is consistent across the board: While 2022’s FBI city-level figures track the police’s own data, the 2023 numbers consistently undercount offense totals. Any year-to-year comparison overstates decline.
Even of those areas reporting, soft-on-crime liberal cities have created the perfect storm for some crimes to appear to decline while they’re skyrocketing.
While the focus here has been on violent crime, the extent to which nonviolent crimes are rising nationally is undoubtedly underreported to a criminal degree. Different types of crime statistics have different degrees of reliability; in that nearly every homicide gets reported to local police, and most violent crimes get reported. However some crimes such as shoplifting aren't as commonly reported, meaning the statistics on the frequency of this sort of crime as more of a minimum rate of occurrence. In the case of cities like San Francisco (among many others) there’s literally no point in a shopkeeper reporting a theft because nothing will happen, and thus the proliferation of the exact kind of crimes those sort of cities incentivizes is masked heavily by non-reporting.
To shine just some light on the absurd extent of the underreporting: San Francisco's shoplifting rate for the entire city doubled for a month because a single Target started accurately reporting every shoplifting case to the police that month. If one single store accurately reporting shoplifting can double a city’s reported crime rate, how high would it be with all the tens of thousands of other businesses (and citizens) in it reporting accurately?
Furthermore, Kennedy and Morgan point out that:
Our analysis of 40 jurisdictions that both reported data to the FBI and the Major Cities Chiefs Association (MCCA) shows that homicide declined 10.2% across 40 major cities in 2023 since 2022, but the FBI reported a 12.8% decline in those same jurisdictions. Similarly, the FBI reported a 6.6% decline in violent crime since 2022, but the same cities reported only a 4.5% drop, with the FBI counting 3,200 more violent crimes in 2022 than the MCCA and 2,600 fewer in 2023 — a net discrepancy of almost 5,900 offenses. That gap conveniently results in a more significant drop in crime levels year to year.
In reality, violent crime is up substantially from 2019 levels. In big cities, murder is still elevated — up 23% since 2019 across all 70 cities tracked by the MCCA and up 18% according to a 32-city analysis by the nonprofit organization Council on Criminal Justice. For aggravated assaults, the Council on Criminal Justice’s 25-city sample found those up 8%, while the MCCA larger sample of cities reported a 26% increase over the same period.
Matt Palumbo is the author of Fact-Checking the Fact-Checkers: How the Left Hijacked and Weaponized the Fact-Checking Industry and The Man Behind the Curtain: Inside the Secret Network of George Soros
Don't miss the Dan Bongino Show
