President Joe Biden has been all too happy to tout crime statistics during his time in office, despite how the American people are concerned about the issue . Just as he is on many other issues, Biden is underwater on crime, but you wouldn't know that the way he talks about it. There's also the amount of violent crimes being committed by illegal immigrants, not helped by the Biden administration's open border policy, which is another problem area for Biden as far as the issues go, and even the worst one for the president, according to RealClearPolling. Thus, the proclamation he made last week is maddening but not surprising.
The White House Briefing Room website shows a series of proclamations from last Friday, including those to do with National Park Week, Earth Day 2024, National Volunteer Week, and then "A Proclamation on National Crime Victims’ Rights, 2024," which was notably the longest of the various proclamations.
After a general first paragraph about victims of crimes, Biden's proclamation gets right into the self-congratulations. "Since I first came to office, my Administration has been working tirelessly with law enforcement, crime victims, and other community leaders across the country to keep Americans safe," it claimed. "Together, we have made historic progress. Last year, the United States had one of the lowest rates of all violent crime in more than 50 years. Murder, rape, aggravated assault, and robbery all dropped sharply, as did burglary, property crime, and theft."
There's a tricky thing about the crime rate and that so-called "historic progress" that Biden's been all too happy to tout lately.
What Biden and those celebrating such numbers fail to mention is how states have struggled to keep up with the FBI's new reporting system. There's key data missing. As the Washington Examiner examined earlier this month:
...In fact, violent crime is up substantially from 2019 levels, and last year’s apparent drop is less significant than it appears.
Part of the problem is how police departments report offenses to the FBI. The FBI asked, then demanded, that law enforcement agencies “transition” away from the system they used for decades to a new, more detailed but onerous one. The 2021 mandate to use NIBRS to submit crime data proved a disaster as overstretched departments, especially in large cities, failed to reach compliance and thus did not submit data.
In 2019, 89% of agencies covering 97% of the population submitted data, but by 2021, that coverage plummeted to less than 63% of departments overseeing just 65% of the population. Chicago, Los Angeles, and New York City all failed to submit crime data. To increase participation, the FBI relaxed the NIBRS requirement in 2022, allowing agencies to report via the legacy system.
But many other cities, such as St. Louis, which had transitioned to the new method, still struggle to comply and submit partial or faulty data. The FBI compensates by relying more heavily on “estimation,” or informed guesswork, to fill in the gaps and produce aggregated data.
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... 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.
Other measures of crime levels undermine, or at least muddle, the veracity of the FBI’s data, which rely on “reported” offenses by victims and law enforcement themselves. The federal government’s own victims’ survey, which attempts to capture the gap between the number of actual offenses and the number reported to police, shows much higher offense rates than the FBI does. Moreover, a rising share of victims are failing to report their victimizations at all. In 2022, only 42% of violent crime victims and 33% of property crime victims bothered to report the crime to police.
That underreporting reduces the reliability of FBI numbers in measuring actual offense levels. For example, robbery offenses, which constitute roughly 25% of all violent crime by volume compared to 5% for murder, declined 18% between 2019 and 2022, according to the FBI, while the victim’s survey suggests a 30% rise.
Another complicating factor is underreporting by the police themselves, who might be under pressure to “downcharge” offenses or dissuade the victims from reporting the crime at all. While the prevalence of underreporting by the police is hard to quantify, an investigation found that between 2005 and 2012, the Los Angeles Police Department erased thousands of crimes, mostly violent assaults, by reclassifying them as lesser offenses or not capturing them at all. The fuzzy math artificially reduced the city’s crime rate by 7%. Any such malfeasance, when officials are under immense pressure to show progress in fighting crime, would inject bad data into the FBI’s estimation model, only compounding its errors.
Fox News' Greg Gutfeld referenced this report in a monologue for "Gutfeld!" recently, which was shared online under the fitting headline of "The left is great at ignoring reality and its victims."
"They're using inferred stats, which brings me to this rule: If you think the numbers stink, it's because they pulled them out of their ass," Gutfeld said about liberal cities such as New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago. "Because when you have a strong incentive to downplay crime, that's what you'll do. And now, victims sense the hopelessness of the justice system and have stopped reporting crime. Can you blame them?"
"That's why the feds claim violent robberies dropped almost 20 percent between 2019 and 2022, while the government's own victims survey reveals it actually went up 30 percent. So the government says, 'Believe us, not the girl with the fat lip and the missing iPhone,'" he continued. "So, actual crime isn't dropping at all, it's just that fewer crimes are being reported because it's not a penalty if the ref didn't call it."
Even the leftist Guardian has warned this year and last year about incomplete data.
There's also been disturbing crime rates in bright blue cities such as Washington, DC and New York, which House Republicans have gotten to the bottom of investigating, including when it comes to a field hearing in the latter, so as to investigate DA Alvin Bragg's soft-on-crime policies. Congress also had to step in to prevent a DC crime bill from going into effect that actually softened penalties.
The next paragraph then claims that "Reducing violence and crime is a top priority for my Administration," though the misleading framing of the issue, and the response from Biden and his fellow Democrats to illegal immigrant crime hardly inspires any confidence.
Going back decades, Biden's statement goes on to read that, "As a United States Senator, I supported the law that established the Crime Victims Fund, which directly compensates victims and finances victim assistance services. As President, I signed a law to replenish and strengthen the fund so that victims can continue to access the resources they need."
When it comes to Biden's time as a senator as it applies to crime, it's also worth bringing up how much criticism he faced for his Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act that was signed into law by then President Bill Clinton in 1994. He also had his name on the Biden-Thurmond Violent Crime Control Act of 1991, along with segregationist Strom Thurmond.
In the lengthy paragraph touching upon the Violence Against Women Act (VAWA), Biden's proclamation also mentioned how "[n]ow, more survivors have access to trauma-informed care, including those in the LGBTQI+ community and from rural areas," a demographic that the Biden administration seems to mention every chance it gets.
Given that Democrats are so prone to doing so, it's no surprise that Biden also devoted an entire lengthy paragraph to "address[ing] the gun violence epidemic in America." He also touts signing a gun control bill into law back in 2022.
Biden has also made concerning remarks about his disdain for the Second Amendment throughout his term, especially claiming it's "not absolute," all while he and the abortion-obsessed Democratic Party insist that the so-called right to an abortion is. From his claims about cannons, to his signaling of support of getting rid of handguns, to the various gun control measures, including those headed to the U.S. Supreme Court during his term, he's not a friend of gun rights' activists.
Just as he's underwater on crime overall and immigration, he's also underwater on guns. On crime, RealClearPolling has Biden at a 38.2 percent approval rating, while 56.8 percent disapprove. It's even worse with immigration, in that just 32.2 percent approve of how Biden is handling the issue, while 63.3 percent disapprove. There isn't an average of polls on the gun issue, but last week's poll from The Economist/YouGov shows just 35 percent of registered voters approve of his handling of the issue while 55 percent disapprove.
Further, even in cities where there is particularly strict gun control laws, such as New York, there's still violent crimes, including the murder of NYPD Officer Jonathan Diller last month. His accused killer had had 21 prior arrests. When asked about Diller's death at the time, White House Press Secretary couldn't even say his name. She also read from her binder as she gave condolences and spent a significant portion addressing gun control, also touting the legislation just as Biden did in this proclamation.
Karine Jean-Pierre just used NYPD Officer Jonathan Diller's death to push for more gun control, while making no mention of Democrat-run cities' soft-on-crime policies.
— Townhall.com (@townhallcom) March 27, 2024
The man who shot Officer Diller has 21 prior arrests, including for first-degree robbery and selling drugs to… pic.twitter.com/hiw20Pxo3L
The proclamation is 11 paragraphs long, plus his signature. There is zero mention of illegal immigrant crime, though.
Regardless as to the veracity of the claims, it's also notable that other than the first and last two paragraphs, there's no focus on the plight that victims of crimes and their families endure. Then again, why would we expect that from a president who only referenced Laken Riley during last month's State of the Union address because he was pushed to do so by Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA). Even still, Biden couldn't properly say the name of the 22-year-old murdered nursing student, whose accused killer, Jose Antonio Ibarra is here illegally from Venezuela and had faced prior arrests. He instead referred to her as "Lincoln Riley."
It was during that address though, unsurprisingly, that Biden was also too happy to brag about these supposed crime rates.
Biden's proclaimed April 21 through April 27, 2024 to be National Crime Victims’ Rights Week.