Crime Going Down?
The Crime Prevention Research Center (CPRC) published an interesting study covering an 8 years period.
Percent of Violent Crime NOT Involving Guns:
2015 94%
2016 91%
2017 92%
2018 93%
2019 92%
2020 92%
2021 92%
2022 91%
But, but, but, Joe Biden and his Democrat minions say the answer to violent crime is more gun control, even though less than 10% of violent crimes involve guns. Could they be misleading us in order to promote their policies of disarming law-abiding citizens? Why not go after the other 90+%?
A SCOPE member sent the above to us. In researching the background, we found some other interesting information.
The U.S. employs two distinct measures of crime:
The Federal Bureau of Investigation’s Uniform Crime Reporting program counts the number of crimes reported to police annually.
The Department of Justice’s Bureau of Justice Statistics, in its National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS), asks 240,000 people a year whether they have been victims of a crime.
The two measures have diverged since 2020: The FBI has reported less crime, while the NCVS reports that more people say they have been victims.
Taking advantage of this statistical difference, in his State of the Union address this year, President Joe Biden proclaimed: “America is safer today than when I took office…last year, the murder rate saw the sharpest decrease in history, and violent crime fell to one of the lowest levels in more than 50 years.”
Did Joe do battle with the truth (again)? Why the difference?
Several large cities no longer report crime statistics to the FBI. As the Washington Examiner notes: “In 2019, 89% of agencies covering 97% of the population submitted data, but by 2021, that coverage plummeted to less than 63% of departments overseeing just 65% of the population.“ Included in those that no longer report to the FBI are New York City and Los Angeles.
In addition, the CPRC says that FBI is undercounting crimes. The CPRC cited discrepancies in reports from cities such as Baltimore, Milwaukee and Nashville. The CPRC stated: “This trend is consistent across the board: While 2022’s FBI city-level figures track the police’s own data, the 2023 numbers consistently undercount offense totals. Any year-to-year comparison overstates decline.”
Basically, any year-to-year comparison of crime by the FBI is no longer valid since the basis of comparison has radically changed. Which means Biden’s statement about the decrease in crime is not valid and the general public perception that crime is an increasing problem is backed up by the National Crime Victimization Survey. Per CPRC: “While the violent crime rate reported to police fell by 1.7% between 2021 and 2022, the National Crime Victimization Survey shows that total violent crime (reported and non-reported) rose from 16.5 to 23.5 per 100,000.”
(Put another less gentle way, the general public has a better grasp of the issue than Biden and the Democrats.)
There is also another big problem with using the FBI Uniform Crime Report data on crimes reported to police because victims don’t report many crimes.
Why is that?
Per CPRC: “The number of crimes reported to police falls as the arrest rate declines. If people don’t think the police will solve their cases, they are less likely to report them to the police.” (Emphasis added.)
The DOJ Crime Victimization report affirms the CPRC statement, but buries it: “Victims may not report a crime for a variety of reasons, including fear of reprisal or getting the offender in trouble, believing that police would not or could not do anything to help, and believing the crime to be a personal issue or too trivial to report.”
If people don’t report crimes because they do not believe anything positive will come of it, is that a reflection on the “soft-on-crime policies of the Left? And if that is so, could those policies be the reason why liberal media fails to cover non reporting of crime as a reason for the statistical (but not real) drop in crime.
Put another way: do you believe Joe Biden or your lying eyes?
