A startling trend based on contradictory data from the Bureau of Justice Statistics and the Federal Bureau of Investigation indicates that violent crime is not going down; rather, it has increased and is not being reported, according to Crime Prevention Research Center President John Lott.
Lott detailed the trend during a Trump campaign press call on Friday, hours before the National Fraternal Order of Police endorsed former President Donald Trump.
The expert pointed to a substantial divide in violent crime incidents reported by the Bureau of Justice Statistics’s National Crime Victimization Survey versus those reported by the FBI. The divide is especially eye-poping because data in the past from the two organizations has trended closely together, he notes.
“There are two measures that the Department of Justice puts out on crime,” Lott explained:
One is the FBI data on crimes reported to police, and the other one is the National Crime Victimization Survey from the Bureau of Justice Statistics, which gets at a measure of total crime, both reported and unreported. They do that by surveying a mass of 240,000 people each year, and they’ve been doing that for 50 years.
“What you find is that these two measures, prior to 2020, generally moved along together, but, since 2020, they’ve moved in opposite directions in each year, often by very large amounts,” he added. “If you take 2022, which is the last complete data that we have final data for both of those two measures, while the FBI showed a 2 percent drop in reported violent crime, the National Crime Victimization data showed a 42 percent increase in violent crime.”
Indeed, in 2021, the FBI reported 387 violent crimes per 100,000 people. The figure dropped to 380.7 per 100,000 people in 2022. Yet, the National Crime Victimization survey found that reports of violent crimes increased 42 percent, from 16.5 incidents per 1,000 people in 2021 to 23.5 per 1,000 people in 2022.
According to Lott, one cause of this trend is that the enforcement of certain crimes has “collapsed” over recent years:
Enforcement of violent crime and property crime has collapsed in this country. If you take just the FBI data, which is what the media, generally, and what the Democrats want to go and look at, in the five years before COVID in large cities of over a million, for example, the average arrest rate for violent crimes was 44 percent. It started falling, and after that, by 2022, it was down 20 percent. That’s over a 50 percent drop in three years. It’s never, in the entire time that we’ve had FBI data, it’s never been anything even closely low to that.
Notably, some blue states and Democrat district attorneys in major cities have embraced soft-on-crime policies in recent years, including cashless bail for certain felony offenses in some places, like New York.
Lott emphasized that a factor in whether victims will actually report a violent crime is whether or not they believe their perpetrator will be held to account.
“So, the question you have to ask yourself is: Do you think it’s more interesting to look at reported crimes or total crimes?” he posed to reporters on the call. “And one of the reasons why this collapse is important is that we’ve known for a long time the rate that people report crimes to the police depends, in part, on whether they think anything’s going to happen, whether they think the criminals are going to be arrested and punished.”
“And if they don’t think criminals are going to be arrested and punished, they’re less likely to go and report crimes to the police,” he added.