The FBI’s quarterly crime and use of force report press statement on June 10 touted major drops over the previous year in violent crimes, including murder.
“The Quarterly Uniform Crime Report (Q1), January-March, 2024, provides a preliminary look at crime trends for January through March 2024 compared to January through March 2023. A comparison of data from agencies that voluntarily submitted at least two or more common months of data for January through March 2023 and 2024 indicates reported violent crime decreased by 15.2 percent. Murder decreased by 26.4 percent, rape decreased by 25.7 percent, robbery decreased by 17.8 percent, and aggravated assault decreased by 12.5 percent. Reported property crime also decreased by 15.1 percent.”
U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland issued a statement praising the “historic” drops.
“This data makes clear that last year’s historic decline in violent crime is continuing,” said Garland. “In the first three months of this year, violent crime has decreased by over 15 percent compared to same period last year, and murder has decreased by over 26 percent.”
President Biden also said, "Violent crime is dropping at record levels in America. It's good news for our families and our communities.”
Biden then tried to take credit by saying, "This progress we're seeing is no accident.”
“My Administration is putting more cops on the beat, holding violent criminals accountable, and getting illegal guns off the street - and we are doing it in partnership with communities,” said Biden. “As a result, Americans are safer today than when I took office.”
This “historic” drop in crime is not what Americans are seeing daily, especially when one considers illegal immigration crime driving some headlines.
Case in point, a day after the FBI made it’s crime data announcement, six Russian nationals with ties to ISIS were captured in a multi-city sting by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) in coordination with the FBI’s Joint Terrorism Task Forces. There was a wiretap and a bomb plot involved.
“Remember the Boston marathon [bombing]? I’m afraid something like that might happen again or worse,” one of the sources told the NY Post, which broke the story.
These individuals since have been confirmed to have come across the southern border illegally.
Gallup polled this issue last November and found 63% of Americans see crime as a serious issue with 28% reporting their household being victimized.
These results followed an early November Gallup poll that showed Americans personal safety fears had hit a three decade high.
And this disparity between the FBI’s stats and reality exists because there’s a problem with the data. Let’s get into why.
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The data, and hence the results are flawed for to main reasons:
It only includes about 76-77% of the nation’s population areas
Reporting has not included large U.S. cities
Back in 2021, police agencies, mainly in Blue states with the exception of Florida, stopped reporting crime data to the FBI. According to the Marshall Project, nearly 1/3 of law enforcement agencies failed to report their crime data.
A 2022 NY Post article underscores the issue:
Nearly 40% of all law enforcement agencies — including in the nation’s two largest cities — failed to submit any data to the feds, who reported that violent crimes ticked down by about 1% across the country, from 1,326,600 in 2020 to 1,313,200 in 2021.
Those failing to turn in crime data included some of the nation's biggest cities like New York City and Los Angeles.
Part of the data problem stems from the FBI switching to a new reporting system and a rather large number of law enforcement agencies didn't make the switch along with them.
"More than 6,000 law enforcement agencies were missing from the FBI’s national crime data last year, representing nearly one-third of the nation’s 18,000 police agencies. This means a quarter of the U.S. population wasn't represented in the federal crime data last year, according to The Marshall Project’s analysis." - Marshal Report, July 13, 2023.
The non-reporting skewing the data was the topic of an April 2024 post by the Crime Prevention Research Center (CPRC):
The divergence is due to several reasons. In 2021, 37% of police departments nationwide, including Los Angeles and New York, stopped reporting crime data to the FBI. The more important point here is how this has changed over time. As the Washington Examiner notes: “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.“
In addition, in cities from Baltimore to Nashville, the FBI is undercounting crimes those jurisdictions reported.
That same post began by drawing attention to the incongruities between the FBI's data and that of the Bureau of Justice Statistics in its National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS):
The U.S. employs two distinct measures of crime. The Federal Bureau of Investigation’s Uniform Crime Reporting program counts the number of crimes reported to police annually. The Bureau of Justice Statistics, in its National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS), asks 240,000 people a year whether they have been victims of a crime.
The two measures have diverged since 2020: The FBI has reported less crime, while more people say they have been victims. For example, between 2021 and 2022, the FBI UCR showed reported violent crime fell by 2.1%, but the NCVS showed reported violent crime increased by 29.3%. The figure at the top of this post clearly shows how the two measures rarely move together.
CPRC’s visualization of the incongruence between NCVS and FBI data is rather dramatic.
So, in essence, one could argue that the NCVS is a more accurate reflection of what the average person is seeing.
Violent crime news reports increasing in North Carolina has been hard to miss, especially youth crime.
There have been at least 14 juveniles either sought by police or charged for murder/attempted murder in North Carolina between Jan. and May of this year.
That has not gone unnoticed by lawmakers who have tweaked the “Raise the Age” legislation by making serious felonies an automatic trip to Superior Court instead of Juvenile Court.
The bill making the changes has passed both chambers of the General Assembly and is sitting on Governor Roy Cooper’s desk and he has until June 16 to sign, veto, or let it pass into law without his signature.