The Crime Prevention Research Center (CPRC) has analyzed data just released from the Justice Department’s National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS) showing that violent crime has soared under Biden-Harris.
For some reason, the NCVS does not measure crimes of homicide, but data on rape, robbery, and aggravated assault show that those crimes increased by 55 percent nationally under Biden between 2020 and 2023. This compares with a 15 percent decrease during the Trump years. Specifically, the rates for those three types of violent crime were as follows: rape, increased by 42 percent; robbery, increased by 63 percent; and aggravated assaults, increased by 55 percent.
In the recent debate, former president Trump echoed the charge that violent crime has risen sharply under the current administration. Avid “fact checkers” like ABC’s David Muir were quick to cite FBI statistics that purport to show “a downward trend in violent crime” instead. The CPRC responds that there are two ways to measure crime: One way — the FBI way — is to count the number of crimes that are “reported to police.” The other way — the way they insist is more accurate — is to survey some hundreds of thousands of Americans yearly as to whether they have been victims of crime. They explain:
[W]e know people don’t report most crimes to the police and that the change in total crime seems much more relevant to people’s experience than the change in reported crime.
In addition, even when the police departments themselves have been informed, many departments simply do not report the data to the FBI. The CPRC adds:
[I]n 2022, 31% of police departments had stopped reporting crime data to the FBI, including the departments in three of the five most populous cities (New York, Los Angeles, and Phoenix). Another 24% of police departments only partially reported crime data. Thus fewer than half of police departments reported complete crime data to the FBI.
How many of the newly added crimes are committed by illegal aliens we aren’t told, but it’s a certainty we’ll not get a credible number from the FBI. For these and other reasons why Mr. Muir and others should be wary of quoting that agency, see the CPRC website.