While most experts agree per-capita violent crime rates are dropping, many say incomplete FBI crime reports exaggerate those declines.
LOUISVILLE, Ky.—Crime is a standard election issue but rarely have parties and candidates offered such starkly polar narratives about public safety than in 2024 campaigns, criminal justice experts say.
That’s not surprising when local and state law enforcement agencies define, collect, and report crime data differently, and at different times, leading to incomplete statistics that allow candidates to “pick and choose what story to tell,” maintains Prof. Alex Piquero, sociology and criminology chair at the University of Miami.
“There’s lot of different crime stories” to manipulate, Piquero, a former U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics director, told state lawmakers, legislative aides, and lobbyists on Aug. 6 during the National Conference of State Legislators’ (NCSL) Annual Legislative Summit in Louisville, Kentucky.
“What we need to worry about, especially in an election year,” he said, is the availability of “transparent, reliable data that is the cornerstone of any smart policy.”
That’s lacking in the 2024 election cycle.
Republicans, spearheaded by former President Donald Trump’s campaign, are generally claiming violent crime is increasing, especially in urban areas, because of Democrat’s perceived “soft on crime” policies.
According to the FBI’s 2024 first quarter report, the nation’s reported murder rate fell by 26.4 percent, reported rapes decreased by 25.7 percent, reported robberies fell by 17.8 percent, reported aggravated assault fell by 12.5 percent, and reported property crimes decreased by 15.1 percent compared to the same period in 2023.
“We are absolutely trending in the right direction” in most crime categories, Piquero said, calling the “precipitous decline” in homicides “a good news story,” with murder rates “going back to where we were before the pandemic and even lower.”
Citing NCVS, Trump claims that violent crime has increased 43 percent since he left office in January 2021, including a 58 percent increase in rapes, 89-percent increase in aggravated assaults, and a 56 percent increase in robberies.
Despite the former president’s claims, there is consensus that per-capita violent crime rates are falling and have been since the 1990s. Data consulting firm AH Datalytics and the Council on Criminal Justice are among nonpartisan analysts who agree violent crime is falling. But they also note that incomplete data in the FBI UCRs exaggerate that decline.
Crime Prevention Research Center President John Lott, Jr., an economist long associated with conservative think tanks such as the American Enterprise Institute, is among those who maintain that FBI UCRs are inaccurate.
That’s a valid argument, Piquero concurred, noting that only about 77 percent of the nation’s 18,000 law enforcement agencies—about 11,000—voluntarily report data to the FBI for its annual report, and even fewer participate in the quarterly “snapshots,” which the agency only began issuing in 2020.
Do People ‘Feel Safe?’
Critics cite numerous discrepancies between data posted by the FBI and individual law enforcement agencies. For instance, the UCR Q1 records 46 homicides reported by the New York Police Department while the department’s own data document 82 murders during the same span.
Arizona State University School of Criminology and Criminal Justice Director Beth Huebner said national crime statistics based on “reported” crimes will always be flawed when “we don’t even know how many police agencies there are in the United States, or how many jails there are.”
Crime is local and often episodic, Piquero and Huebner said. “Where I live in Miami, it’s a big area, but crime is concentrated really in one place, and really within a few blocks in that place,” Piquero said.
Crime often begets crime in spikes that don’t reflect averages—or “rates”—over specific time frames, Piquero said. “Think about a baseball player over a period of 162 games,” he said. “There is the season average” and then there’s how the player performed this week.
“You should be able to go to your city and see where the crime was last night,” she said.
“If it bleeds, it leads, so that’s the story,” he said, citing “headline-grabbing incidents” making it difficult to convince voters to “look beyond the headlines, the sensationalism” and see criminal justice reform programs work.
“Violent crime [is] going down the last year, the last year-and-a-half” in Washington but many see “Ethiopians engaging in street gun battles in Seattle” on local TV, Goodman said. “That makes people feel it is happening everywhere.”
Lawmakers struggle with crafting policy amid a “cognitive dissonance” in which “crime is down but people don’t feel safe,” he said.
“Communities are bombarded with a distorted narrative about safety and ‘get tough on crime’ rhetoric,” Huebner agreed, but crime rates and whether people “feel safe” can be different things.
“Safety is a holistic idea,” she said. “Everyone wants to feel ‘safe.’ What does it mean to be ‘safe?’ Can I send my kid to the park? Is there a streetlight on my street?”
New apprehensions making people feel unsafe are surfacing in surveys that aren’t categorical crimes, Huebner said.
“People don’t feel safe if they can’t afford a home,” she said, noting survey respondents increasingly “mention [societal] disorder” among their top fears.
“There is less trust in government and in officials than there has been for a while,” Huebner said.