The Patriot Post® · Lies, Damned Lies, and Crime Statistics
As it turns out, crime “goes down” if you stop counting crimes.
That’s a stark characterization, but it’s effectively what some Democrat-controlled cities are doing before proclaiming success at fighting crime. They don’t need Donald Trump to clean up crime, you see, because they’ve already been stunningly successful.
Never mind the fact that they fomented crime among their constituents in the wake of George Floyd’s death — caused by a toxic brew of drugs and heart failure — by stirring up anger and hatred over the supposed systemic racism of police. The increased crime is frequently black-on-black.
For several months, Trump’s Justice Department has been evaluating crime statistics collected and reported by various cities. Earlier this year, we learned that Washington, DC, was undercounting crime in part by reducing felonies to misdemeanors, and in part by simply not responding to or reporting minor crimes. That problem is far more widespread than Democrats want you to know.
“Shootings and homicides on our highways are down 60, 70, 80% depending on where you look,” boasted Illinois Governor JB Pritzker, who is fighting tooth and nail to block Trump from deploying the National Guard to Chicago.
And yes, it does “depend on where you look,” so to speak.
In Chicago, New York, Los Angeles, Portland, Oregon, and elsewhere, Democrat district attorneys are downgrading felonies to misdemeanors, accepting various forms of plea deals, and then telling us that crime is down. “If these public officials were CEOs who purposely manipulated losses into earnings,” said one Trump DOJ official, “they would face serious criminal fraud charges.”
The full DOJ report has not been released, but you can expect it to uncover loads of this sort of manipulation.
In another sense, however, the report will only make concrete what we’ve long known — despite Leftmedia misdirection. When Trump claimed during last year’s debate with Kamala Harris that violent crime was rising, ABC moderator David Muir jumped in for a phony “fact-check,” saying, “President Trump, as you know, the FBI says overall violent crime is coming down in this country.”
The Leftmedia has been gaslighting ever since, continually reporting falling crime every time Trump asserts that crime is actually a problem. Evidently, we’re supposed to rest easy amidst the crime thanks to the misguided belief that it’s not as bad as it was a couple of years ago.
Economist John Lott, who frequently reports on crime, writes, “A new Bureau of Justice Statistics report, which includes data through 2024, shows that Trump was right during the debate when he said, ‘Crime here is up and through the roof.’ The National Crime Victimization Survey shows violent crime surged 59%, with rape and sexual assault up 67%, robbery up 38%, and aggravated assault up 62%. That’s the largest four-year increase in the survey’s 52-year history.”
Lott points to another phenomenon that our Mark Alexander highlighted recently — the FBI’s crime data is becoming increasingly unreliable.
There are two key reasons for this. First is the aforementioned problem of Democrat stat manipulation. For example, Lott notes, “Downgrading aggravated assaults to simple assaults removes them from the FBI’s violent crime statistics.” Reducing charges is a big problem: “In Manhattan, for example, the district attorney’s office downgraded felonies 60% of the time — with 89% downgraded to misdemeanors and 11% to less serious felonies.”
The most famous exception to Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg’s scheme was, of course, Donald Trump. Bragg craftily upgraded a couple of bookkeeping violations to 34 felonies so he could affix the label “convicted felon” to the GOP presidential candidate. Seventy-seven million Americans saw through the charade.
The second reason for faulty FBI stats is harder to pin down — the reluctance of victims to even bother reporting a crime. “When people believe police won’t catch or prosecutors won’t punish criminals,” Lott explains, “they’re simply less likely to report crimes. Between 2010 and 2019, victims reported 63.3% of violent crimes to police. In the last three years, that number plummeted to 48.8%. Arrests fell as well — from 26.5% before COVID-19 to just 16.6% afterward.”
Judges bear a lot of blame, too. Consider the case of Edward Coristine, a young DOGE staffer who famously adopted the name Big Balls. He was violently assaulted while helping to prevent a carjacking in DC, but the assailants may not truly face justice.
Superior Court Judge Kendra Briggs had little but sympathy for the 15-year-old who pepper-sprayed Coristine while her fellow thugs beat him. “I know you are not unfamiliar to trauma,” the judge told her. “I don’t disagree that the trauma you’ve already suffered in life is kind of how you ended up on U Street that day.”
That poor girl got nine months’ probation for simple assault. A 15-year-old boy charged with beating Coristine got 12 months’ probation. Granted, they’re juveniles, but neither served a day behind bars despite knowing exactly what they were doing.
Crime will not actually go down in this country so long as Democrats are merely manipulating statistics and discouraging victims from reporting. In fact, quite the opposite. It’s a novel idea for some, but in order to make our cities safer, criminals must face real justice.