Violent crime is a horrible thing. All crime is horrible, for that matter. That there are people in the world who think so little of other people and other people’s rights that they feel comfortable doing terrible things to others to fulfill their own personal desires is despicable.
But according to the FBI’s crime statistics, crime rates are falling. How do we know that? Because they are repeated by the Biden administration over-and-over again in an effort to make Joe Biden sound like an effective President who is protecting his country.
Is that really the truth, though? Are crime rates decreasing in the U.S.? We have an answer for you (hat tip to here for the lead). John Lott writes,
The U.S. has two different measures of crime. The FBI Uniform Crime Reporting program annually counts the number of crimes reported to police. The Bureau of Justice Statistics, by contrast, uses its annual National Crime Victimization Survey to ask 240,000 people a year whether they have been victims of crime. The survey, known as the NCVS, is used to estimate total crime, reported and unreported. The survey indicates that only 42% of violent crimes and 32% of property crimes were reported in 2022, the last year the NCVS data is available.
Since 2020, the FBI’s reported crimes and the NCVS’ total crimes have gone in opposite directions. For instance, between 2021 and 2022, the FBI reported a 2.1% drop in violent crime, but the NCVS showed an alarming increase of 42.4% — the largest one-year percentage increase in violent crime ever reported by the survey. The increase in 2022 over 2020 is slightly greater.
Now, you might ask why those two measures of crime levels would have such wildly different results. Great question, which Lott also addresses. Lott continues:
A frequently discussed concern with the FBI data is the decline in the number of police departments reporting crime after a new reporting system was used. In 2022, 31% of police departments nationwide, including Los Angeles and New York, didn’t report crime data to the FBI. That is better than 2021 but still much worse than the 97% of agencies covering most of the U.S. reported in 2020. In addition, in cities from Baltimore to Nashville, Tennessee, the FBI is undercounting crimes those jurisdictions reported.
Still, other problems exist. Police departments downgrading crimes can also explain the drop in the FBI numbers.
To put it bluntly, the FBI’s statistics don’t include a huge portion of the crimes committed in the U.S., and some of the areas with the highest levels of criminal activity are not reporting to that database.
No wonder Biden keeps using those FBI statistics: they are blatantly false indications of the real situation that Biden can pretend are actually accurate. In other words, it’s all a lie.
The fact of the matter is that crime isn’t down. What is down is the reporting to the FBI by more local law enforcement offices. And that simply means that the FBI’s crime statistics, like so many other statistics used by anti-2A zealots, simply can’t be trusted.
So one is from Police Depts while the other is from possible victims. You could even say the second one is about if they feel that they were victims of a crime. So the first one has holes in its total coverage while the second one is above someone’s feelings. Adding that we don’t know if the large urban areas are having higher or lower percentages of crime, assuming they do is just sour grapes. We have to go with the official numbers versus the feelings.