If you’re as concerned as I am about crime, you’ll be voting – as I am – for Donald Trump for President.
Violent crime is on the rise – overall, it’s up by 53 percent over three years ago, according to data from the Bureau of Justice Statistics’ annual National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS), released in early September.
You’re excused for not being aware of these statistics. When the report was issued several weeks ago, there was scant coverage in the mainstream media.
Instead, in a rather obvious example of cherry-picking government data to make a point, the mainstream media chose to highlight the FBI's annual crime report, which showed crime rates dropping.
For instance, ABC News anchor David Muir questioned former President Donald Trump during Trump’s debate with Vice President Kamala Harris: “President Trump, as you know, the FBI says overall violent crime is coming down in this country, but Vice President the…” Trump responded, “Excuse me, the FBI – they were defrauding statements. They didn’t include the worst cities. They didn’t include the cities with the worst crime. It was a fraud. Just like their number of 818,000 jobs that they said they created turned out to be a fraud.”
Understanding the data, and getting it right, are crucial to making informed choices – after all, garbage in, garbage out.
Trump was right in his debate pushback to Muir’s assertion. The current FBI data is not accurate, and offers no valid comparisons to prior years, because it is incomplete. The FBI data set, as Trump pointed out, does not include reported crimes from three of the nation’s five largest cities – New York, Los Angeles, and Phoenix.
The FBI changed its reporting requirements in 2021, and not all police departments have adapted to the change. In 2020, prior to the change, about 97 percent of police departments reported their annual data to the FBI. By 2022, fewer than half the police departments in the country were reporting their crime data, and 31 percent were not reporting at all (including New York, Los Angeles, and Phoenix, among others) according to John Lott of the Crime Prevention Research Center.
That’s an unprecedented drop in reporting, and it makes the FBI’s data set highly suspect.
By contrast, the Department of Justice has another data set that’s compiled differently – the Bureau of Justice Statistics produces its National Crime Victimization Survey every year, based on actually talking to people, many of whom are victims of crimes. To conduct its survey, the BJS talks to 240,000 respondents, living in 150,000 households all over the country.
In contrast to the FBI data, which shows violent crime dropping, the NCVS data says it’s staying the same: “In 2023, the rate of violent victimization in the United States was 22.5 victimizations per 1,000 persons aged 12 or older, which was similar to the 2022 figure.”
But then comes the showstopper, buried in the data: Between 2020 and 2022, the rate of violent victimization reported to police jumped by 53 percent. And it stayed the same last year.
Importantly, the NCVS data also includes crimes that are not reported to police as well as crimes that are. Crimes not reported to police are on the rise, and by a significant factor – for instance, only 42 percent of robberies were reported to police in 2023, compared to 64 percent that were reported to police in 2022. And the percentage of motor vehicle thefts reported to police in 2023 was just 72 percent, compared to 81 percent in 2022.
Why the significant drop in reporting crimes to the police? It may have something to do with an increasing belief that it makes no difference if you report a crime to the police, because no good will come of it. You won’t get your property back, and you won’t even see the criminal who victimized you get arrested, let alone be prosecuted or convicted.
According to Lott's analysis, there’s been a massive drop in arrest rates for reported violent crimes in major cities – he says it’s dropped by 50 percent, while arrest rates for reported property crimes in major cities has dropped by a whopping 65 percent. In 2022, he says, in major cities, only 20 percent of reported violent crimes resulted in arrests, and only 4 percent of reported property crimes resulted in arrests.
This is no accident. This is the product of a deliberate effort to change our nation’s approach to enforcing the law and policing crime. It started a long time ago, and includes efforts by, among others, George Soros, to elect 75 soft-on-crime local prosecutors around the country.
Soros-funded district attorneys have been leading the charge in big cities all over the country to soften the authorities’ approach to enforcing the law. The results of this nationwide effort have been horrendous. In San Francisco, for instance, the crime spree under the Soros-funded district attorney was so bad that even the liberal electorate there elected to recall the district attorney.
On the day Joe Biden dropped out of the contest for president and endorsed Kamala Harris to replace him, Soros and his son Alex endorsed her for president.
And that’s just one more reason I’ll be voting for Donald Trump for President.
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