There are two types of crime in this nation. One is the fake type, the Lavrentiy Beria type, the KGB-esque “show me the man and I’ll find you the crime” type, which has seemed to come down hardest on people in Donald Trump’s orbit, including Trump himself. These are often “process” crimes bordering on entrapment, or misdemeanors deemed criminal and then reanimated years later as felonies to avoid the statute of limitations.

But this article is about the other type: the stolen bike, the vandalized window, the gang of shoplifters cleaning out a store, or the murder.

For decades, the FBI has compiled statistics on crime in America, called the Uniform Crime Reporting Program, and the bureau’s numbers were always regarded as rock-solid. As a corollary to that, elsewhere in the Department of Justice, the Bureau of Justice Statistics operates the National Crime Victimization Survey, which looks at crime from the standpoint of the victim, whether it was reported or not.

This issue comes into play when the FBI reports a 3% drop in crime from 2022 to 2023, which we’re told obviously belies the Trumpian claim that crime is increasing. But former BJS head Jeffrey H. Anderson noted in City Journal that the FBI’s methodology is inconsistent, noting that his former agency cataloged a surge in urban violent crime from 2019 to 2023 — the precise areas where FBI statistics are lacking because big cities are slow to report their data.

As National Review’s Andrew McCarthy adds:

Anderson is relying on the BJS’s National Crime Victim Survey. The NCVS is a Nixon-era crime measuring tool. It is the gold standard because it grapples with the fact that most crime — probably about 55 percent — goes unreported. By searching for victims, rather than recording only crimes that are reported to the police, it provides a more accurate depiction.

By contrast, the FBI does not just miss unreported crime; it has been struggling since 2021 (the first year of the Biden-Harris administration, amid the crime surge) to implement a new crime-reporting system. Many police agencies do not report their crime data.

If you live in a big city with an understaffed and beleaguered police department, the chances are your stolen bike isn’t going to get any attention. So why bother reporting it? And if your city isn’t reporting its crime data, you’ll get an incomplete picture of the situation — which is handy if you want to claim crime is coming down. Our Emmy Griffin looked at this situation last month.

There’s an old saying that a liberal is a conservative who hasn’t yet been mugged by reality. As society descends into a state where some get away with the crimes they commit because they have the right connections or fall into a demographic that’s considered oppressed, we’re told that we shouldn’t believe our own lying eyes. In this case, the “fact-checkers” don’t look at all the facts before they check.

Americans should be cautioned, though. It will take more than a change of administration to solve the problem. Somewhere we’ve gotten off track in teaching right from wrong and that not every means should be used in justifying an end. However, it would certainly help if we got rid of the twisted belief that when it comes to crime, some criminals are more equal than others.