The ABC moderators for the presidential debate between Donald Trump and Kamala Harris couldn’t have been more biased. Not once did they fact-check Harris’ long list of lies. But I will leave the fact-checking of David Muir and Linsey Davis’ lies to others. I will focus on only one of Muir's discussions on crime.
DAVID MUIR: “President Trump, as you know, the FBI says overall violent crime is coming down in this country, …”
In fact, Trump was correct about the increase in crime under Biden. While violent crime fell by 17 percent under Trump, Biden has seen it rise by 43 percent.
Muir doesn’t understand what the FBI is measuring. The FBI counts the number of crimes reported to police. Trump was right that less than half of police departments are now giving that data to the FBI, but, more importantly, Trump was discussing what was happening to total crime, not just the number of crimes reported to police.
There are two measures of crime: One, the FBI’s Uniform Crime Reports (UCR), counts the number of crimes reported to police yearly.
The other, the Bureau of Justice Statistics’ National Crime Victimization Survey, asks about 240,000 people each year whether they have been victims of crime, in an attempt to measure both reported and unreported crimes.
We know that crime victims report only about 40 percent of violent crimes and 30 percent of property crimes to police.
Prior to 2020, the FBI and NCVS numbers generally moved together.
Since 2020, these two measures have consistently gone in opposite directions: The FBI has been finding fewer instances of crime, but people are simultaneously answering in greater numbers that they have been victims.
For instance, in 2022, the FBI reported a 2.1 percent drop in violent crime, but the NCVS showed an alarming increase of 42.4 percent — the largest one-year percentage increase in violent crime ever reported by that measure.
There are several reasons for this difference, but a simple one is that law enforcement has collapsed. If people think criminals won’t be caught and punished, they are less likely to report crime to the police. Using the FBI data, if you compare the five years preceding Covid-19 with 2022, the percentage of urban reported violent crimes resulting in an arrest fell from 44 percent to 35 percent. And among cities with more than 1 million people (where most reported violent crime occurs), arrest rates plunged, by more than half, from 44 percent to 20 percent. There has never been a similar drop in FBI data.
But there are problems with even the FBI’s measure of reported crime. 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.
It is puzzling enough that measures of reported and total crimes don’t match. But when even these two measures of the same thing — reported crime — are going in opposite directions, there are real concerns about the FBI data.
A frequently discussed concern with the FBI data and a possible explanation for part of the discrepancies is the decline in the amount of crime reported by police departments after a new reporting system was introduced in 2021. In 2022, 31 percent of police departments nationwide, including in Los Angeles and New York, didn’t report crime data to the FBI. Another 24 percent of departments only partially reported data. So less than half of police departments reported complete data in 2022. That is better than 2021 but still much worse than what the 97 percent of agencies covering most of the U.S. reported in 2020. In addition, in cities from Baltimore to Nashville, the FBI is undercounting crimes those jurisdictions reported.
Still other problems exist. The downgrading of crimes by police departments can also explain the drop in 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 radical left-leaning DAs are refusing to include weapons charges against defendants. That could explain the difference between the two measures of reported crime, because the NCVS will ask victims whether the assault involved a weapon, even if the police reports ignore that characteristic of the crime.
Progressive district attorneys nationwide, from New York to Chicago to Los Angeles, are downgrading felonies to misdemeanors. Recent numbers show that Manhattan’s progressive DA downgraded felonies to lesser charges 60 percent of the time; and, of that 60 percent, 89 percent were downgraded to misdemeanors. That isn’t a new problem. In the past, Chicago has intentionally misclassified murders, instead labeling them as subject to noncriminal “death investigations.” However, the problem may be increasing, and police may also be responding to the decisions of prosecutors.
Trump is right that there is a crime emergency in our country, and ABC and the Democrats’ misleadingly using statistics to cover it up endangers us all.
John R. Lott Jr. is president of the Crime Prevention Research Center. He served as senior adviser for research and statistics in the Office of Justice Programs and the Office of Legal Policy at the Justice Department.
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