Since the beginning of this year's abbreviated presidential campaign, former President Donald Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris have told different stories about crime trends during the Biden administration. As the Trump campaign tells it, "homicides are skyrocketing," and violent crime has risen dramatically since Trump left office.
While the first claim is inconsistent with data from multiple sources, the second claim finds support in the National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS), which does not cover homicides but tracks other kinds of violent offenses, whether or not they were reported to police. The Harris campaign, by contrast, prefers the FBI's numbers, which reflect only reported crimes. Judging from those numbers, Harris says, "Americans are safer now than when we took office."
The latter narrative took a hit recently when the FBI quietly revised its 2022 numbers, which initially indicated a 2.1 percent drop in violent crime. Economist John R. Lott Jr., president of the Crime Prevention Research Center, found that the revised numbers indicate a 4.5 percent rise in the reported violent crime rate, which you can see in this FBI Excel file. Last month, the FBI estimated a 3 percent drop in reported violent crime between 2022 and 2023, which Lott says would have been half as large but for the change in the 2022 numbers.
Lott says the FBI publicly noted that upward revision only with a vague statement that "the 2022 violent crime rate has been updated." He and other critics argue that the FBI's reticence makes it hard to trust the agency's data: If the FBI's 2022 "update" changed a decrease into an increase, can we be confident that something similar won't happen with the 2023 numbers? What about the FBI's preliminary numbers for 2024, which indicate a 10.3 percent drop in reported violent crime between the first half of last year and the first half of this year?
While it is fair to ask why the FBI did not forthrightly acknowledge or explain its revision to the 2022 numbers, a downward trend beginning last year is consistent, in direction if not magnitude, with the numbers reported by other sources. According to AH Datalytics, which separately tracks data from hundreds of law enforcement agencies, reports of violent crime in that sample fell by 2.6 percent in 2023. Its numbers show a continuing drop this year: The total for the 12 months ending in August 2024 was 3.2 percent lower than the total for the 12 months ending in August 2023.
Last July, the Council on Criminal Justice (CCJ), based on data from a sample of 39 cities, compared crime reports for the first half of 2024 to crime reports for the first half of 2023. It found that reports of homicide, aggravated assault, gun assault, carjacking, robbery, and domestic violence fell by 13 percent, 7 percent, 18 percent, 26 percent, 6 percent, and 2 percent, respectively. The CCJ reported that "most violent crimes are at or below levels seen in 2019, the year prior to the onset of the COVID pandemic and racial justice protests of 2020."
The picture is clearest with homicide, the most serious violent crime and the one that is hardest to miss. In addition to the 13 percent drop reported by the CCJ for January through June, a report from the Major Cities Chiefs Association that covered 69 cities indicated a 17.4 percent drop during the same period. AH Datalytics, based on a sample of 277 cities, reports a similar 17.9 percent drop so far this year.
There is no basis, in short, for the Trump campaign's claim that "homicides are skyrocketing." And according to the FBI's numbers, homicides in 2023 were down by 10 percent compared to 2020, Trump's last year in office. AH Datalytics reports a similar drop for its sample: 9.5 percent.
Comparing 2023 to 2020 may seem unfair to Trump, since the latter year saw a huge 30 percent spike in homicides, which may have been related to the pandemic, the unrest that followed George Floyd's death, or both. Using 2019 as the comparison year works to Trump's benefit, since the number of homicides in 2023 was still substantially higher than the number in 2019 (about 17 percent higher, according to the FBI). But by Trump's logic, which blames the Biden administration for any increases in crime since 2020, Trump likewise should be blamed for the 2020 homicide surge.
Moving beyond homicides, Trump is on firmer ground in noting that the violent crime victimization rate measured by the NVCS was 37 percent higher in 2023 than it was in 2020. In recent years, especially in 2022, changes indicated by the survey have diverged dramatically from the FBI's numbers for reasons that are not entirely clear. Even with the FBI's adjustment for 2022, there is still a large gap between the increase in violent crimes measured by the NCVS (which, again, do not include homicide) and the increase in reported violent crimes tallied by the FBI.
One factor could be a drop in the share of crimes reported to police, which according to the NCVS fell from 45.6 percent in 2021 to 41.5 percent in 2022. Lott suggests another possible explanation in his Real Clear Investigations piece about the FBI's revised 2022 numbers:
Over the past few years, the number of police officers has declined because of cuts in budgets and many retirements. One result is that police departments nationwide—from Charlottesville and Henrico County, Va., to Chicago, Ill. and Olympia, Wash.—are no longer responding to calls unless the perpetrator is still there actively committing the crime. Instead of police coming out to investigate and take a report, residents in those jurisdictions can still go to the police station and wait in line to get a police report filled out. In addition, despite the widespread belief that calling 911 is enough to report a crime, the FBI officially doesn't tally 911 calls. It only counts crimes when police make out an official report.
By contrast, Lott says in an email, the NCVS may record crimes as reported to police even when there is no official report because "people believe calling up 911 counts as reporting a crime."
It is also worth noting that the NCVS covers crimes experienced from July of the previous year through November, while the FBI's numbers cover the calendar year. The difference in the periods covered could help explain the 2022 divergence. That difference may also have played a role in 2020, when the NVCS measured a 22 percent drop in the violent victimization rate but the FBI recorded an increase in reported violent crime, even excluding homicides.
Between 2022 and 2023, according to the NCVS, the share of violent crimes reported to police rose from 41.5 percent to 44.7 percent. Meanwhile, the per capita rate of reported violent crimes rose by 4.1 percent, which Lott argues is reason to doubt the 2023 drop estimated by the FBI. Yet according to the NCVS, the overall violent victimization rate fell by 4.3 percent last year, while the rate excluding simple assault fell by 11.2 percent. Although those changes were not statistically significant and we should not make too much of one year's results, they could be a sign that the NCVS and FBI trends are converging, since both sources indicate a drop in violent crime last year.
Historically, the trends indicated by these two sources have been broadly similar. Between 1993 and 2023, the rate of reported violent crime measured by the FBI fell by 51 percent. During the same period, the violent victimization rate measured by the NCVS fell by 72 percent.
In addition to the question of what is happening now with homicides (which have fallen substantially since 2020, according to several sources) and violent crime generally (which likewise seems to be falling), there is the question of how much credit or blame any given president should get for these trends. Since crime control is mainly a state and local function, it would be unfair to hold Trump responsible for the 2020 surge in reported violent crime. But by the same token, it is implausible to suggest that the current president (let alone his vice president) is responsible for the 2022 surge in violent victimizations recorded by the NCVS.
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