There’s a large contingent of people who want you to believe each successive year is worse than the last one. Despite being the beneficiary of a two-decade run of historically low crime rates, the United States is often portrayed as a crime-ridden wasteland where only the bravest dare to police the mean streets.
This year is no different. Opportunists and alarmists are claiming crime rates are spiking again, backing up these assertions by pointing to highly local anomalies. They then make this worse by conjuring up their favorite ideological boogeymen to support their claims about the Dangerous States of America.
They claim “progressive” prosecutors are increasing crime rates by not prosecuting enough low-level crimes and prosecuting too many police officers. That claim might make sense if there were actually enough “progressive” prosecutors to have this sort of effect. But there are thousands of prosecutors across the nation, ranging from the county to the federal level and only a couple dozen of them could generously be considered to be “progressive.”
They also claim “defunding” law enforcement agencies has led to spikes in crimes because there’s not enough money being spent on cops. This, again, is bullshit. There has been no serious “defunding” of any law enforcement agency anywhere. At most, some funds have been diverted to support the formation of units composed of mental health professionals to handle distress calls cops probably shouldn’t be handling anyway.
Then there’s the most ridiculous supporting argument for their false claims: cops aren’t doing their jobs because the public just doesn’t deserve their help. This is pretty much just blaming the victims. But the origin of this theory goes back to the cops themselves. An unjustified killing is often met with protests. Protests lead to legislators temporarily pretending to care about police accountability. Lots of stuff gets said. Every so often, a bill that barely changes the accountability status quo gets passed. A bunch of cop union reps say dumb things about cops being “unfairly targeted.” And then cops just stop doing their job because… they were threatened with, at most, a mild increase in accountability. TL;DR: cops won’t do their actual jobs if they’re not being showered with unconditional love from the public.
All of these arguments are stupid. And none of them can support the theory the country is descending into a new period of historically high crime rates.
You know what else doesn’t support this theory? Actual crime rates. The latest edition of the FBI’s Uniform Crime Report has been released. And it shows across-the-board drops in violent crime rates.
A comparison of data from agencies that voluntarily submitted at least two or more common months of data for January through March 2023 and 2024 indicates reported violent crime decreased by 15.2 percent. Murder decreased by 26.4 percent, rape decreased by 25.7 percent, robbery decreased by 17.8 percent, and aggravated assault decreased by 12.5 percent. Reported property crime also decreased by 15.1 percent.
Now, there are caveats, of course. And some of those will be used by tough-on-crime opportunists to justify their latest fusillade of misinformation to score points with constituents or further their anti-criminal justice reform theories.
As the FBI notes, only 72% of the nation’s law enforcement agencies contributed to this report, so there’s still a lot of crime that hasn’t been reported to the FBI. Whether or not that would change the overall percentages is unknown, but this is not a completely comprehensive view of the nation’s crime rates.
On top of that, the FBI drastically altered how crimes were reported in 2021. This has led to less participation as local agencies get used to the new reporting requirements. It also means some crimes are being categorized incorrectly, which may result in under-reporting or over-reporting of certain types of crimes.
That being said, the UCR has never had a 100% participation rate. It’s always been much lower than that. And the add-on to this FBI reporting — use-of-force reporting — has been significantly lower since its inception more than two decades ago.
There’s reason to question what’s reported by those participating, as well. It’s not unusual for law enforcement agencies to polish stats, either to make their efforts look more useful than they are or to demonstrate spikes in crimes that might be useful when annual budgets are being discussed.
Like anything else, this reporting involves thousands of people with their own motivations and their own ability to generate clerical errors.
That being said, it has historically been used to provide a useful snapshot of crime rate trends. And for that reason, despite its drawbacks, there’s little reason to believe the decreases reported by the FBI are so off the mark, they can’t possibly be trusted. This is a straight-up year-to-year comparison utilizing the same reporting requirements and with basically the same amount of participation as last year’s reporting. So if the reporting is flawed, at least this year-to-year comparison involves similarly flawed data sets.
This is not to say there aren’t places in the United States where crime rates are going up. But it’s unhelpful, if not actually untruthful, to claim the US is becoming increasingly dangerous. It simply isn’t. And after two decades of historically low crime rates, we should probably expect a slight shift back towards the mean. But anyone telling you the country’s in worse shape than it’s ever been is trying to sell you something.
