There is no doubt that President Joe Biden is trying to downplay the issue of crime going into November’s election.
“Make no mistake: America is making progress against crime — saving lives, and restoring security and peace of mind,” Biden said in a recent statement on what the White House titled a “Record Decrease in Violent Crime.”
The question is whether the FBI is fudging their nationwide statistics to fit the narrative that crime has decreased significantly on the president’s watch.
There are indications that the FBI is doing just that, though it may not be entirely the bureau’s fault — because it is dependent on the data that cities provide.
When cities and localities don’t provide the data, the FBI makes “estimates,” according to an April report entitled “Assessing America’s Crime Crisis” published by the Coalition for Law Order and Safety.
Gallup reported in March that crime is among the top six issues on voters’ minds.
Inflation was at the top of the list, with 55 percent of Americans saying they worry about it “a great deal” and another 24 percent saying it concerned them “a fair amount.”
Crime and violence was second, with 53 percent saying it caused them “a great deal” of concern, while an additional 26 percent said it’s on their mind “a fair amount.”
Similarly, a CBS/YouGov poll of likely voters released earlier this month found that 59 percent of those surveyed said that crime would be a “major factor” in how they cast their ballot, which is lower than the 82 percent who listed the economy and 78 percent who said inflation, but above the 51 percent who indicated abortion.
Swing state voters list the economy, crime & the border as their TOP concerns heading into November – all losing issues for extreme House Democrats. pic.twitter.com/Cn5P2xgwqE
— NRCC (@NRCC) May 20, 2024
Biden and his campaign staff know crime is a major concern for voters.
That’s why in February, the president proclaimed, “Last year, the United States had one of the lowest rates of all violent crime — of all violent crimes in more than 50 years.”
“Murder, rape, aggravated assault, robbery all dropped sharply, along with burglary, property crime, and theft,” he added.
President Biden: “Violent crime rates are down nationwide in nearly every major category!” pic.twitter.com/7vBH2uvx0Q
— Breaking News (@TheNewsTrending) March 11, 2024
Actually, you only have to go back to 2019, pre-pandemic, to find lower crime rates.
Just like Biden’s false claim that inflation was 9 percent when he took office — it’s was 1.4 percent — he’s not being truthful about crime in America.
The CLOS report compiled statistics provided by the FBI, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Council on Criminal Justice for 32 large cities.
But that decline follows a rapid rise from 2019-2021. The homicide rate in the 32 cities was 38% higher in 2021 than it was in 2019, before the start of the COVID pandemic, and it remained 18% higher in 2023 than it was in 2019. pic.twitter.com/znXKw0ML6q
— Council on Criminal Justice (@CouncilonCJ) March 7, 2024
Comparing 2019 to 2023, homicides are up 8.3 percent by the FBI’s numbers, up 19.9 percent per the CDC, and up 18 percent based on the CCJ stats.
Aggravated assault is down 3 percent since 2019, according to FBI statistics, but up 8 percent in the CCJ survey.
Meanwhile, auto theft is up a whopping 44 percent since 2019, the FBI reported.
But as Townhall’s Mia Cathell explained, the FBI’s numbers overall are suspect.
“In 2021, the FBI fully implemented a new crime-data collection system called the National Incident-Based Reporting System (NIBRS), replacing the old way of collecting data from local law enforcement. The move plummeted police participation from 85.4 percent of agencies in 2020 to 62.7 percent the following year,” she wrote.
“Today, many Democrat-led cities still don’t submit crime data in full or at all to the federal government,” Cathell added.
Among the cities that did not submit their statistics to the FBI in 2022 are the police departments of New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Phoenix, Pittsburgh and Kansas City, Kansas.
San Francisco does not plan to comply until 2025.
It’s worth calling out that the change to the crime-data collection system — which often seems to supply crime data reports that help Biden’s optics — occurred in 2021, under his administration.
Former assistant FBI director and current CLOS President Mark Morgan and Executive Director of CLOS Sean Kennedy, who together authored the aforementioned revealing report, argued in a recent piece for the Washington Examiner that the FBI’s data is “unreliable at best and deceptive at worst” because of the reporting issues.
“To adjust for the absence of NIBRS data, the FBI uses estimates to calculate the total number of offenses that would likely have been reported to law enforcement in aggregate,” the CLOS report said. “So, there’s a level of uncertainty in the accuracy of the FBI’s data.”
Morgan and Kennedy elaborated on the problems with estimation in their Examiner article, writing, “That method of inferring offense totals is based on similar jurisdictions and past trends but is prone to error since it cannot compensate for local factors or events.”
Further, “the figures the agencies do report to the FBI do not match the agencies’ publicly reported figures.”
Just released: Q1 violent crime report. Violent crime continues to trend ⬇️ for the majority of @MjrCitiesChiefs member agencies. When compared to Q1 2019 pre-pandemic levels, homicides are ⬆️ 16% and aggravated assaults are ⬆️ 7.5% in the USA https://t.co/aezJVSxtRC pic.twitter.com/Zt6bU2GS8f
— Major Cities Chiefs Association (@MjrCitiesChiefs) May 3, 2024
“For Baltimore, the FBI reported 225 murders in 2023, but the city reported 262 — which means the FBI left out 37 murders. In Milwaukee, the police department reported a 7 percent increase in robberies, but the FBI showed a 13 percent drop,” Morgan and Kennedy wrote.
“Nashville’s own data tallied more than 6,900 aggravated assaults in 2023, but the FBI counted only 5,941, leaving almost 1,000 of those offenses ‘missing.’ 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,” they said.
The men went on to argue that the underreporting of the nature of the crimes themselves gives a rosier picture than what is happening on the street.
“It is difficult to measure how much crime is underreported, often ‘downcharged,’ by law enforcement since the number of reported crimes reflects the categorizations of police agencies themselves,” the CLOS report said.
Cathell elaborated in her Townhall piece, writing, “CLOS identified four factors that have helped cause an increase in crime across most major U.S. cities as a lack of faith in law enforcement persists: de-policing (i.e. defunding the police), de-carceration, de-prosecution, and politicization of the criminal justice system (via politically motivated prosecutors regularly downgrading felonies to misdemeanors or opting not to prosecute).”
Additionally, police are arresting fewer people, James Varney highlighted in RealClear Investigations on May 14.
“Scouring FBI data, John Lott, the founder of the Crime Prevention Research Center, found that arrests for reported violent crimes in major cities fell 20 percent in 2022, from 42.5 percent in 2019 — the year before the COVID pandemic and BLM protests in response to George Floyd’s death while in police custody,” he wrote.
“The percentage of murder and rapes cleared by arrests fell to 40.6 percent from 67.3 percent in those years; for rapes from 33.8 percent to 17.4 percent, and arrests for reported property crimes in major cities dropped to 4.5 percent in 2022 from 11.6 percent in 2019,” Varney added.
“It is not clear how much of this decline is due to reductions in the size of many [police] departments — New Orleans, for example, reportedly lost 20 percent of its force between 2020 and 2022,” he explained.
Morgan and Kennedy concluded in their CLOS report writing, “[T]o say crime is down is like descending from a tall peak and standing on a high bluff, saying you are closer to the ground — a true but misleading statement.”
