On the campaign trail, former President Donald Trump has repeatedly claimed that violent crime has “skyrocketed” since 2020. Vice President Kamala Harris has claimed that violent crimes have decreased to a “near 50-year low.”
Both candidates are narrating different federal statistics that measure violent crime; Trump cites a Justice Department Survey, while Harris cites FBI data on crimes reported by Police departments.
As the 2024 presidential race heads into it’s final weeks, the work of The Sacramento Bee’s fact-checkers becomes even more important.
Whether or not violent crime is “coming down” depends on when you start measuring it. Crime is down from last year, and down significantly from the bad old days of the 1990s, but it is only now returning to pre-pandemic levels. The “coming down” measure also hinges on how crime is reported, and that’s not nearly as scientific a matter as the public might believe.
During the presidential debate with Vice President Kamala Harris, Trump argued that “the FBI – they were defrauding statements. They didn’t include the cities with the worst crime. It was a fraud.”
Trump was partially correct; there’s no reason to think the FBI statistics are deliberately fraudulent, but large gaps and inconsistencies in the collection of data mean the numbers aren’t offering a complete picture.
As the Marshall Project explains, in 2021, “in an effort to fully modernize the system, the FBI stopped taking data from the old summary system and only accepted data through the new system. Thousands of police agencies fell through the cracks because they didn’t catch up with the changes on time.” That year, Miami-Dade, New York City and Los Angeles did not submit their data. Philadelphia reported nine months’ worth of data; Chicago reported seven months; and Phoenix reported only one month. For 2021, The FBI noted, “crime estimates will fill in the gaps where data is not available.”
There’s an alternative to measuring crime with police reports: The National Crime Victimization Survey. Each year since 2001, the Justice Department’s Bureau of Justice Statistics has collected a nationally representative sample of about 150,000 households.
Survey respondents provide information about themselves- age, sex, race, marital status, education level- and whether they’ve been a victim of a violent crime in the past year. Self-reported information is hardly definitive, but it can be useful to consider. The NCVS collects information about the type of crime, whether the crime was reported to police, reasons the crime was or was not reported, and victim experiences with the criminal justice system.
The NCVS data indicates that in 2023, the rate of nonfatal violent victimization in the United States was 22.5 victimizations per 1,000 people age 12 or older, which was similar to the 2022 rate of 23.5. Violent victimization includes rape or sexual assault, robbery, aggravated assault, and simple assault.
That is technically a decline from 2022 to 2023, but it’s a decline of one-tenth of a percentage point, so …. not much. We should also note property crimes increased slightly, from 101.9 incidents per 1,000 households to 102.2.
Despite widely cited FBI statistics about a surging homicide rate during the pandemic years of 2020 and 2021, the NCVS data also indicates that violent victimizations overall were actually lower than in the following years – 16.4 per 1,000 people age 12 or older in 2020, and 16.5 in 2021. That might seem unlikely, given news coverage of that period, but it makes sense: Millions of people were stuck at home and worked from home, putting fewer people on the street to commit a crime or be the victim of one.
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