Who You Gonna Believe? (Updated)

Crime has been generating what look like contradictory headlines.

In October, the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s annual report showed violent crime in 2022 fell to its relatively low, prepandemic level. Yet in November, Gallup reported that a record-high 63% of U.S. adults said the “crime situation in the U.S. is extremely or very serious.”

This seems to suggest that either the crime data is wrong or people are unrealistically negative. There is another possibility: More people are experiencing crime, but it isn’t captured in FBI measures.

“There has long been a mismatch between public perception and reality on crime,” said Ames Grawert, senior counsel at the Brennan Center for Justice, a liberal-leaning legal-policy institute. “But it’s understandable that people would be worried about crime today and we have to take them seriously.”

When you look at how the crime statistics come together, it shows that violent crime can fall and people can simultaneously experience more crime.

The FBI’s crime-statistics system originated in 1930. Its most reported figure, the rate of violent crime, combines the most serious offenses: homicide, rape, aggravated assault and robbery.

This rate is back to its prepandemic level, which itself came near the end of a multidecade decline. From 1991 until 2014 violent crime in the U.S., like much of the world, fell sharply, from 783 incidents per 100,000 people to 362. Grawert called it “one of the least remarked upon but most important social phenomena of our lifetimes.” In 2022, the rate stood at 381, down from a recent peak of 399 in 2020 and back to its 2019 figure, also 381.

But these figures come with qualifiers. The FBI has been changing to a more granular data-reporting system. The switch was supposed to be completed in 2021. But that year many police departments were still learning the new system, so the FBI used data from police departments covering only 52% of the country, and extrapolated the rest, making it difficult to know whether violent crime actually rose or fell compared with 2020. For 2022, the FBI has data from departments covering 94% of the country.

Another caveat is that the violent-crime rate is largely driven by aggravated assaults and robberies, which are far more numerous than homicides. Homicides are naturally a major concern, and the homicide rate abruptly soared in 2020 amid the pandemic—and in 2022 was still 43% higher than in 2014. Much of the decline since the 1990s has been reversed during the past three years.

Then he turns to what I think is a critical component:

An even more important caveat is that violent crimes reported to the police almost certainly undercount actual crimes experienced by people, and trends in the two can diverge.

Separate from the FBI, which gets its data from the police, the Justice Department asks people whether they have been the victims of crime and whether they reported it to the police.

The September National Crime Victimization Survey showed only about 40% of violent crimes were reported to the police in 2022. The number of people who said they were a victim of violent crime rose 42% from 2021, but only 29% more reported crimes to the police.

This data has caveats, too. The survey, traditionally conducted in person, temporarily switched to phone interviews in 2020 and its data that year was at odds with other sources. (It showed no particular increase in crime.) That means 2021’s data isn’t easy to compare to the previous year, leaving the exact crime trend over the past three years unclear.

I’ve already reported the drastic change here in Chicago on 911 responses—the number of calls that should have resulted in a police response has soared. Why? There are multiple reasons but one of them is that when prosecutors won’t prosecute and when they do prosecute judges won’t convict, it discourages the police from responding. Why should you potentially put yourself in harm’s way when it will accomplish nothing?

The FBI relies on local reports and local reports depend on police responses not on police non-responses.

I live in one of the nicest, safest neighborhoods in Chicago. In the last year we’ve had a homicide within four blocks of where I’m sitting and multiple armed robberies and carjackings within two blocks. None of this has ever happened here before. My wife is worried—the subject comes up on nearly a daily basis.

Update

Ruy Teixeira remarks on the same Gallup poll:

It is not hard to discern the continuing influence of current Democratic Party orthodoxy, which views a strong law and order approach as essentially racist and seems way more interested in making it harder to arrest, jail, and prosecute criminals. Voters have pushed back against this orthodoxy in cities from San Francisco to Minneapolis to New York but the national Democratic Party appears terrified to break with the activist groups and liberal elites who push “criminal justice reform” above all else.