Crime in the U.S. has fallen dramatically since 1993. After rising slightly during the pandemic, violent crime is falling again. In 2023, murders dropped by nearly 12% compared to the previous year. The public, however, refuses to believe it.
This mindset is not new. In 23 of 27 Gallup crime surveys conducted since the early 1990s, 60% or more of U.S. adults reported that there is more crime nationally than the year before. Interestingly, local experience with crime doesn’t influence this perception very much. In every Gallup crime survey conducted since the 1990s, Americans are less likely to say that crime is up in their area than the country overall.
This year is no exception. Many Americans are convinced that violent crime is surging despite the fact that it is down.
What Drives This Misperception?
For more than a century, local news has heavily covered violent crime because it grabs and holds their audiences’ attention — and attention drives ad revenue. Social media can nationalize a local news story within minutes.
In election years, politicians, their campaign staff and supporters try to shape public perceptions about everything from the economy to violent crime. Some try to scare people into voting for them. In the 1988 presidential campaign, George H. W. Bush ran an ad against Democratic contender Michael Dukakis that featured a criminal named Willie Horton. It not only helped Bush 41 win; it ultimately reshaped America’s approach to criminal justice.
Disinformation, a topic I’ve tackled in recent months, has taken both practices to a new level. Now, an assertion need not be anchored in fact. When state and local officials angrily denied that Haitian immigrants in Springfield were eating people’s pets, JD Vance, replied, “If I have to create stories so that the American media actually pays attention to the suffering of the American people, then that’s what I’m going to do.”
Venezuelan gangs have not overrun Aurora, Colorado. It’s a lovely community. In fact, researchers have repeatedly found that immigrants do not commit crimes at higher rates than native-born Americans. For example, a 2020 study published in the highly regarded Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences used data from the Texas Department of Public Safety, which checks and records the immigration status of all state arrestees, to examine felony arrest rates among various groups. The researchers found that undocumented immigrants had considerably lower arrest rates compared to legal immigrants and native-born U.S. citizens.
More recently, a 2024 study conducted by a multi-university team analyzed 150 years of U.S. Census data. It found that throughout that time, immigrants were consistently less likely to be incarcerated than people born in the U.S. Beginning in 1960, the incarceration gap widened such that immigrants today are 60% less likely to be incarcerated than the U.S.-born.
Weaponizing Data
Some assertions are more challenging to check out than others, especially when large segments of the public have been persuaded to distrust reputable sources of information. Studies that spin published statistics to produce a different conclusion are particularly difficult for non-experts to recognize. Here’s one such example. Real Clear Investigations posted an Oct. 16 analysis entitled, “Stealth Edit: FBI Quietly Revises Violent Crime Stats.” Within hours, Fox News amplified the story with a highly politicized headline: “FBI quietly updates crime data to show big jump in violence under Biden-Harris admin: ‘Shocking.’” From there, it went viral. A supportive post on X by Elon Musk was viewed more than 50 million times.
Experts quickly spotted several problems with Real Clear’s analysis. First, the FBI regularly updates earlier years of data, so revisions aren’t unexpected or evidence of partisanship. Second, around the same time the FBI revised its 2022 crime counts upward, it lowered its prior 2021 counts. This amplified the shift in crimes from one year to the next.
However, knowledgeable criminologists consider the 2021 data unreliable because the FBI changed its reporting system that year. Furthermore, only about 65% of the country was covered by participating law enforcement agencies that year. The other 35%, including large jurisdictions like New York and Los Angeles, did not submit data. These challenges and the stress of the pandemic injected loads of uncertainty into the 2021 counts.
Since 2021, our nation has emerged from COVID-19 and submission of data from law enforcement agencies has markedly improved. As a result, the counts reported for 2023 are not only more reliable, they paint an encouraging picture.
Crime is Down, Particularly Homicide
Violent crime overall fell by about 3% in 2023 compared to 2022, according to the FBI. More remarkably, murders dropped by nearly 12%, making this the largest one-year decline in the last 20 years. Jeff Asher, a noted crime data analyst, recently observed that other data sources, including NORC’s Live Crime Tracker, the Real-Time Crime Index, the CDC and the Gun Violence Archive, point in the same direction.
Why Does This Matter?
According to a Gallup poll released on Oct. 9, three out of four voters consider crime an “extremely” or “very important” issue. In a presidential election as close as this one, their choices should be based on facts, not fiction.
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