Is the crime rate up or down?

What does data tell us? It depends on what data you look at and how you interpret it. 

See Contrary to Media Myth, U.S. Urban Crime Rates Are Up: The FBI’s flawed statistics hide the disturbing results of the defund-the-police movement since 2020 by Jeffrey H. Anderson. He is president of the American Main Street Initiative. He served as director of the Bureau of Justice Statistics, 2017-21. Excerpts:

"The NCVS [National Crime Victimization Survey] report for 2023 finds no statistically significant evidence that violent crime or property crime is dropping in America. Excluding simple assault—the type of violent crime least likely to be charged as a felony—the violent crime rate in 2023 was 19% higher than in 2019, the last year before the defund-the-police movement swept the country.

But crime hasn’t risen equally across the nation. America’s recent crime spike has been concentrated in urban areas. These are the areas in which leftist prosecutors have gained the strongest footholds, where police have been the most heavily scrutinized, and where lax enforcement and prosecution have become common.

The results aren’t pretty. According to the NCVS, the urban violent-crime rate increased 40% from 2019 to 2023. Excluding simple assault, the urban violent-crime rate rose 54% over that span. From 2022 to 2023, the urban violent-crime rate didn’t change to a statistically significant degree, so these higher crime rates appear to be the new norm in America’s cities.

The urban property-crime rate is also getting worse. It rose from 176.1 victimizations per 1,000 households in 2022 to 192.3 in 2023. That’s part of a 26% increase in the urban property-crime rate since 2019. These numbers exclude rampant shoplifting, since the NCVS is a survey of households and not of businesses.

In contrast, violent-crime rates in suburban and rural areas have been essentially unchanged since 2019. In suburban areas in 2019, there were 22.3 violent victimizations per 1,000 persons 12 or older, compared with 23.3 in 2023—a statistically insignificant change. In rural areas, the rate was 16.3 in 2019 and 15.3 in 2023—again, not a statistically significant change. Our recent crime spike is essentially limited to cities."

But there was a letter to The WSJ which offered a different view. See Too Soon to Say That Crime Is Rising in 2024.

"Jeffrey Anderson is right to caution against overreliance on Federal Bureau of Investigation data due to its revised counting method (“Contrary to Media Myth, U.S. Urban Crime Rates Are Up,” op-ed, Sept. 23). But his use of the National Crime Victimization Survey also has a problem: It doesn’t count murder victims, as they can’t participate in the survey.

A good source for murder counts, AH Datalytics, provides year-to-date murder figures for several hundred cities, based on official counts. They show an 18% drop in murder from January to September compared with the same period last year. This decline is across-the-board; cities of a million or more people saw an 18% fall, as did cities of over 250,000.

Since murder is also a good indicator of violent-crime trends in general, it is premature to claim that crime is rising in 2024.

Em. Prof. Barry Latzer

John Jay College of Criminal Justice

New York"

Also see FBI finds violent crime declined in 2023. Here’s what to know about the report from The Associated Press. Excerpts:

"Violent crime in the U.S. dropped in 2023, according to FBI statistics that show a continued trend downward after a coronavirus pandemic-era crime spike.

Overall violent crime declined an estimated 3% in 2023 from the year before, according to the FBI report Monday. Murders and non-negligent manslaughter dropped nearly 12%."

"The FBI collects data through its Uniform Crime Reporting Program, and not all law enforcement agencies in the U.S. participate. The 2023 report is based on data from more than 16,000 agencies, or more than 85 percent of those agencies in the FBI’s program. The agencies included in the report protect nearly 316 million people across the U.S. And every agency with at least 1 million people in its jurisdiction provided a full year of data to the FBI, according to the report."

"The FBI’s report is in line with the findings of the nonpartisan Council on Criminal Justice, which earlier this year analyzed crimes rates across 39 U.S cities, and found that most violent crimes are at or below 2019 levels. That group found there were 13 percent fewer homicides across 29 cities that provided data during the first half of 2024 compared the same period the year before."