While most experts agree that per-capita violent crime rates are dropping, many say incomplete FBI crime reports exaggerate those declines.
LOUISVILLE, Ky.—Crime is a standard election issue, but rarely have parties and candidates offered such starkly polar narratives about public safety than in 2024 campaigns, criminal justice experts say.
That’s not surprising when local and state law enforcement agencies define, collect, and report crime data differently, and at different times, leading to incomplete statistics that allow candidates to “pick and choose what story to tell,” maintains professor Alex Piquero, sociology and criminology chair at the University of Miami.
“There’s a lot of different crime stories” to manipulate, Piquero, a former U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics director, told state lawmakers, legislative aides, and lobbyists on Aug. 6 during the National Conference of State Legislators’ annual Legislative Summit in Louisville, Kentucky.
“What we need to worry about, especially in an election year,” he said, is the availability of “transparent, reliable data that is the cornerstone of any smart policy.”
That’s lacking in the 2024 election cycle.
Republicans, spearheaded by former President Donald Trump’s campaign, are generally claiming that violent crime is increasing, especially in urban areas, because of Democrat’s perceived “soft on crime” policies.
Democrats, meanwhile, generally maintain that per-capita violent crime, after a spike in 2020 and 2021 during the COVID-19 pandemic, has been declining for decades. They point to the FBI’s January–March 2024 Uniform Crime Report (UCR), which cites a 15.2 percent drop in overall violent crimes, as evidence of that trend.
According to the FBI’s first quarter 2024 report, the nation’s reported murder rate fell by 26.4 percent, reported rapes decreased by 25.7 percent, reported robberies fell by 17.8 percent, reported aggravated assault fell by 12.5 percent, and reported property crimes decreased by 15.1 percent compared with the same period in 2023.
“We are absolutely trending in the right direction [in most crime categories],” Piquero said, calling the “precipitous decline” in homicides “a good news story,” with murder rates “going back to where we were before the pandemic and even lower.”
President Joe Biden touted the first quarter statistics in a June 10 White House statement: “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. As a result, Americans are safer today than when I took office.”
Trump in a June 22 address at Philadelphia’s Temple University called the same first quarter statistics, and the FBI’s annual 2023 UCR showing similar declines since 2022, “fake numbers.”
Trump prefers data from what he called the “much better” Bureau of Justice Statistics’ National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS), which annually queries about 250,000 people nationwide about their experiences and impressions regarding crime.
Citing the NCVS, Trump claims that violent crime has increased by 43 percent since he left office in January 2021, including a 58 percent increase in rapes, 89 percent increase in aggravated assaults, and a 56 percent increase in robberies.
But those statistics are outdated and selective because the NCVS hasn’t been updated since 2022 and reflects data collected in 2020–2021; for much of that time, Trump was in the White House.
Despite the former president’s claims, there is consensus that per-capita violent crime rates are falling and have been since the 1990s. Data consulting firm AH Datalytics and the Council on Criminal Justice are among nonpartisan analysts who agree that violent crime is falling. But they also note that incomplete data in the FBI Uniform Crime Reports exaggerate that decline.
Crime Prevention Research Center President John Lott Jr., an economist long associated with conservative think tanks such as the American Enterprise Institute, is among those who maintain that those FBI reports are inaccurate.
The “decline in reported crimes is a function of less reporting, not less crime,” he wrote in an April Wall Street Journal column.
That’s a valid argument, Piquero concurred, noting that only about 77 percent of the nation’s 18,000 law enforcement agencies—about 11,000—voluntarily report data to the FBI for its annual report, and even fewer participate in the quarterly “snapshots,” which the agency began issuing in 2020.
“There’s a lack of reliable and timely data, especially in small communities and on tribal lands,” he said, noting that suicides and overdoses “don’t get counted” by most jurisdictions in criminal statistics.Critics cite numerous discrepancies between data posted by the FBI and data posted by individual law enforcement agencies. For instance, the UCR Q1 records 46 homicides reported by the New York Police Department while the department’s own data document 82 murders during the same span.
Dallas police agencies reported 22 murders in January–March 2024 to the FBI, but the Texas Department of Public Safety’s crime data dashboard documents 50 homicides.
Arizona State University School of Criminology and Criminal Justice Director Beth Huebner said national crime statistics based on “reported” crimes will always be flawed when “we don’t even know how many police agencies there are in the United States, or how many jails there are.”
Crime is local and often episodic, according to Piquero and Huebner.
“Where I live in Miami, it’s a big area, but crime is concentrated really in one place, and really within a few blocks in that place,” Piquero said.
Crime often begets crime in spikes that don’t reflect averages—or “rates”—over specific time frames, he said.
“Think about a baseball player over a period of 162 games,” Piquero said. “There is the season average,” and then there’s how the player performed this week.
National “crime statistics only go so far,” Huebner said, noting that most states, counties, and municipalities have online dashboards and other tracking programs that chart local crime in near-real time more accurately than the FBI’s Crime Data Explorer and National Use-of-Force data do.
“You should be able to go to your city and see where the crime was last night,” she said.
Washington state Rep. Roger Goodman—noting that polls show that most Americans believe crime is increasing, and that they routinely have across the decades despite per-capita crime rates declining—said the media-fueled fascination with crime skewers public perception.
“If it bleeds, it leads, so that’s the story,” he said, citing “headline-grabbing incidents” making it difficult to convince voters to “look beyond the headlines, the sensationalism” and see that criminal justice reform programs work.
“Violent crime [is] going down the last year, the last year and a half” in Washington, but many see “Ethiopians engaging in street gun battles in Seattle” on local TV, Goodman, a Democrat, said. “That makes people feel it is happening everywhere.”
Lawmakers struggle with crafting policy amid a “cognitive dissonance” in which “crime is down but people don’t feel safe,” he said.
“Communities are bombarded with a distorted narrative about safety and ‘get tough on crime’ rhetoric,” Huebner said, but crime rates and whether people “feel safe” can be different things.
“Safety is a holistic idea,” she said. “Everyone wants to feel ‘safe.’ What does it mean to be ‘safe?’ Can I send my kid to the park? Is there a streetlight on my street?”
New apprehensions making people feel unsafe are surfacing in surveys that aren’t categorical crimes, Huebner said.
“People don’t feel safe if they can’t afford a home,” she said, noting that survey respondents increasingly “mention [societal] disorder” among their top fears.
“There is less trust in government and in officials than there has been for a while,” Huebner said.