Democrats want you to think crime is decreasing in the United States, and even cite data that shows their claims are valid. However, the truth is, is that violent crime is not declining; it has actually increased— but not being reported.
According to data from the Bureau of Justice Statistics and the FBI, crime is not decreasing but instead worsening under the current leadership.
Crime Prevention Research Center President John Lott explained that there are “two measures that the Department of Justice puts out on crime.” For example, in 2021, the FBI reported only 387 crimes committed per 100,000 people. The following year, the agency only reported 380.7 violent crimes per 100,000 people. However, data contradicts this number.
National Crime Victimization data found that violent crime increased by 42 percent in 2022.
One is the FBI data on crimes reported to police, and the other one is the National Crime Victimization Survey from the Bureau of Justice Statistics, which gets at a measure of total crime, both reported and unreported. They do that by surveying a mass of 240,000 people each year, and they’ve been doing that for 50 years.
What you find is that these two measures, prior to 2020, generally moved along together, but, since 2020, they’ve moved in opposite directions in each year, often by very large amounts. If you take 2022, which is the last complete data that we have final data for both of those two measures, while the FBI showed a 2 percent drop in reported violent crime, the National Crime Victimization data showed a 42 percent increase in violent crime.
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Lott pointed out that before COVID-19, crime was decreasing. The arrest rate in the five years before COVID was 44 percent, noting that crime rates began decreasing, and by 2022, it was down 20 percent.
Since the Biden-Harris Administration took office, many liberal governors have taken a soft-on-crime approach to its policies. Los Angeles, New York City, and Chicago— three of the highest crime cities in the U.S.— are not reporting crime data. This contradicts White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre, who claimed that violent crime is at a 50-year low.
Lott pointed out that whether a crime will be reported depends on whether the criminal will be arrested.
“If they don’t think criminals are going to be arrested and punished, they’re less likely to go and report crimes to the police,” he said.
Democrats like to tout that crime rates have decreased. They will take, for instance, the fact that crime has gone down in a city but fail to mention that it's still much higher than it was years before.
For example, annual homicides in Denver were down four percent in 2023, but they were still 14 percent higher than in 2019. In Albuquerque, crimes were down 21 percent in 2023, but they were still 86 percent higher than in 2018.
In addition, the Fraternal Order of Police (FOP) revealed that a police officer in the United States has been shot every 22 hours this year under the Biden-Harris Administration. In the last two years, over 630 officers were shot-- a 60 percent increase since 2018.
"The causes are obvious,” FOP National Vice President Joe Gamaldi said. “A revolving door criminal justice system, 85 percent of cop killers have been arrested before, 71 percent are convicted felons, and because some politicians, media, and activists realized there was a dollar to be made trafficking in anti-police rhetoric, trying to convince the American public we are the enemy.”
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