The Patriot Post® · In Brief: The Truth About the Crime Explosion
Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg recently claimed that the RNC was promulgating a false message that illegal immigration “was leading to an increase in crime.” He further added, “If you look this up at home, you will know that crime went down under Biden and crime went up under Trump. Why would America want to go back to the higher crime we experienced under Donald Trump?”
Well, to put it bluntly, Buttigieg is engaged in another instance of telling the American people not to believe their lying eyes. As National Review’s John R. Lott Jr. explains:
A Gallup survey last November showed that 92 percent of Republicans and even 58 percent of Democrats believed that crime was rising. In a series of surveys from March last year to April this year, Rasmussen Reports finds a remarkably constant percentage of Americans who believe that violent crime is getting worse — 60 percent to 61 percent. Roughly four times as many people think violent crime is rising rather than getting better.
So, why do the statistics appear to show a decrease in crime? Lott points out, “If you defund the police so arrest rates plummet and people give up reporting crime, then crime statistics can look good even as chaos ensues.”
Those who say crime is falling rely on the FBI’s National Incident-Based Reporting System (NIBRS). But the problem is that the FBI data only count crime that is reported to police, not total crime, and even then, the FBI does a poor job of measuring reported crime.
There are two measures of crime. The FBI’s NIBRS counts the number of crimes reported to police each year, but the Bureau of Justice Statistics uses its National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS) to ask about 240,000 people each year whether they have been victims of crime. Since 2020, these two measures have been highly negatively correlated. The FBI has been finding fewer instances of crime, but people are simultaneously answering in greater numbers that they have been victims.
People stop reporting crime because they don’t believe the police will do anything about it.
In large cities, the arrest rate in 2022, compared with the average from 2015 to 2019, fell by 38 percent for murders, 50 percent for rapes, 55 percent for aggravated assault, and 58 percent for robberies. As police budgets were cut and a large number of police retired, police concentrated their limited resources on the most serious crimes, particularly murder.
As mentioned above, since 2020, the numbers for FBI’s reported crimes and the NCVS’s total (reported and unreported) crimes have gone in opposite directions. For instance, in 2022, the FBI reported a 2.1 percent drop in violent crime, but the NCVS showed an alarming increase of 42.4 percent — the largest one-year percentage increase in violent crime ever reported by the NCVS. The increase in 2022 over 2020 is slightly greater.
Ignoring crime doesn’t mean that crime has become less of a problem, but that is effectively what the Biden administration has done. And then celebrates it as progress.
Lott concludes, “There is a crime emergency in our country, and misleadingly using statistics to cover it up, as Mayor Pete does, endangers us all.”