Crime Stats Still Show a Decline Since 2020

Quick Take

Crime statistics compiled by the FBI and other sources show an increase in violent crime, notably murders, in 2020 and a decline since. A revision to the FBI data this year doesn’t change that overall trend, despite claims made on social media and by the Trump campaign to the contrary.

---

Full Story

Local law enforcement agencies voluntarily report crime data to the FBI, which compiles the figures in annual reports on crime nationwide, with some estimation done when agencies don’t report figures for a full year, or at all. The annual figures for 2023, released last month, show a decline in violent crime since 2020 — the last year of former President Donald Trump’s administration.

In 2020, the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic, there was a spike in violent crime overall, due to increases in murders and aggravated assaults. Experts have said that the pandemic, and its economic repercussions, was one factor behind the increase. Violent crime has eased back down since then.

The number and rate per 100,000 population for violent crime overall, as well as for murder and nonnegligent manslaughter, rape, robbery and aggravated assault, all went down from 2020 to 2023, according to the FBI-compiled statistics. The violent crime rate dropped by 22.5 points, the murder rate declined by 0.9 points. The number of murders decreased by 14.5%. (For these figures, see the Crime in the United States Annual Reports here and download the CIUS Estimations file for 2023. See Table 1.)

As we have reported, other sources of crime stats show the same trend. The Major Cities Chiefs Association reports, with the addition of New York City’s statistics, show a 9.1% decrease in the number of murders in 70 large U.S. cities from 2020 to 2023, and a further decline for the first half of 2024. As of early this month, AH Datalytics, an independent criminal justice data analysis group, reported a 17.9% decrease in murders in more than 250 U.S. cities so far this year, compared with the same points in 2023. 

“Violent crime rose in 2020 and has fallen since then though the rise in violent crime has always been more muted than people assume. Murder, by contrast, rose a ton in 2020 and is falling a ton right now,” Jeff Asher, co-founder of AH Datalytics, recently wrote in a Substack post.

Despite these trends, Trump and other Republicans have wrongly claimed throughout the campaign that violent crime has gone up under President Joe Biden. Trump has even claimed that the FBI statistics are “fake.”

Now, the campaign has seized on a yearly revision of the FBI figures. Revisions are routinely done every year, but this year’s were notable because they flipped what was a decline in violent crime from 2021 to 2022 in last year’s report to an increase. (Adam Gelb, president and CEO of the independent Council on Criminal Justice, told us this can happen with revisions, particularly when dealing with “low single-digit percentage point changes.”)

The Trump campaign says the revision is proof that Trump was “right,” and social media posts are falsely claiming the FBI data now reveal that crime has “skyrocketed” or “gone through the ROOF” under Biden.

Even with the revisions, however, the 2022 — and 2023 — figures for violent crime, and murder specifically, are lower than the figures for 2020.

At an Oct. 20 rally in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, Trump took issue with ABC News fact-checking him during the debate with Vice President Kamala Harris when Trump claimed that “crime in this country is through the roof.” ABC News moderator David Muir countered, “As you know, the FBI says overall violent crime is actually coming down in this country.”

In Lancaster, Trump wrongly said, “No, no crime is way up. And the FBI, we have to look at this because the FBI put out charts that crime was down initially because they didn’t report certain little areas of the country like the worst areas in the country for crime, and it turned out that their stats were very wrong and very misleading. But he [Muir] was wrong because it was — it’s up like at least 45%.”

Muir wasn’t — and isn’t — wrong, though. The revised FBI figures still show that overall violent crime has come down since 2020, Trump’s last year in office. And they in no way show that crime is up 45%. (Trump often cites the National Crime Victimization Survey, a survey that asks people whether they had been victims of various crimes, though we didn’t see his 45% figure there. The survey has its own limitations, and it doesn’t measure murder, as we’ve explained.)

Trump’s description of how the FBI figures were revised is also off.

Revised Crime Figures

Here’s a comparison of the FBI figures reported last year and the revised figures released last month. As the charts show, while the revisions increased the rate of violent crime (and murder) in 2022, there was an even larger downward revision to the 2021 figures.

One social media post claimed that the FBI “found” 1,699 more murders in 2022, but that’s not the case. The FBI revised the number of murders in 2022 upward by 625, and it revised the 2021 total downward by 1,074.

There’s also reason to doubt, or not read too much into, the 2021 numbers, which, due to a change in methodology, had to be estimated a lot more than usual. That’s the year that had the problem Trump alluded to — fewer law enforcement agencies reporting figures. But the issue is unique to 2021.

Asher told us in a phone interview that the revised 2021 numbers are likely an undercount. AH Datalytics and other crime data sources found a slight increase in murders in 2021 from 2020, so it “doesn’t make a lot of sense” to see a decrease in the latest revision, he said.

As we’ve explained before, the FBI has been transitioning to a new system for data collection, and in 2021, it required local law enforcement agencies to use what’s called the National Incident-Based Reporting System. But at that time, many police departments, including those in New York and Los Angeles, hadn’t switched to NIBRS, so they weren’t included in the raw 2021 statistics. When releasing the 2021 figures initially, the FBI and the Bureau of Justice Statistics provided national estimates for 2021, but they were based on data that covered only about 65% of the population.

Before then — and after 2021 — the data reported by law enforcement agencies covered 90% or more of the population. For 2022 and 2023, participation in NIBRS increased, and the FBI also has accepted data submitted through the older system for agencies that haven’t made the switch. So, the low-reporting problem in 2021 is isolated to that year.

The latest annual figures for 2023 were based on data covering 94.3% of the U.S. population, while 2020 and 2022 figures were based on data covering 97% and 95% of the population, respectively, as shown in a chart Asher published in an Oct. 21 Substack post.

Despite subsequent revisions to the 2021 numbers, they are still uncertain. The reports from law enforcement agencies for that year now cover only 74.1% of the population. 

“Normal levels of participation in 2020, 2022 and 2023 help paint a story of US crime trends that doesn’t rely on the faulty 2021 data,” Asher wrote. “The 2021 estimates were deeply flawed and should largely be ignored. That was true in 2022, it was true in 2023, and it’s true in 2024.”

“I would feel happier if everyone just ignored” the 2021 figures, Asher told us, calling that year’s total a “bad” estimate.

The FBI sent us a statement explaining how the 2021 figures have been estimated since they were first released. It said, as we explained, that because of a “lower volume of participation, the FBI was unable to produce the traditional national estimates for 2021.” To provide a comparison of crime trends, it had performed an “estimation crime trend analysis” for the figures the FBI initially published.

The following year, when it released the 2022 statistics, the 2021 figures included “a statistical sampling of 2021 data to augment the 2021 information collected via NIBRS.” Then, with the release of the 2023 report this year, the FBI revised the 2021 figures to “reflect only estimates based on the data directly reported to the FBI. This explains why the figure appears different than the computed estimation published in the Crime in the Nation, 2022.”

The FBI said that the Crime in the Nation 2023 report “was the first phase in the FBI’s efforts to provide the public with more timely data. The next phase will see a shift to monthly data releases to promote transparency and provide an opportunity for consumers to review data based on more timely crime counts with the understanding that data will be continuously updated. As part of this movement, the FBI has moved towards automation, allowing for past years’ estimates to be updated as data are submitted.”

Some comments by the Trump campaign could leave the impression that the FBI had done something dishonest. Asher and Gelb said there is no evidence of anything like that.

In a campaign email, the Trump campaign said: “A new report reveals the FBI secretly updated its crime data to show that violent crime didn’t drop by 2.1% in 2022, but instead increased in 2022 by 4.5%,” pointing to a report in RealClearInvestigations, which had highlighted the FBI revisions, calling them a “stealth edit” that the FBI didn’t mention in its press release about its report.

Sen. JD Vance, Trump’s vice presidential running mate, said in a speech in North Carolina on Oct. 16 that the FBI “just released some updated crime numbers which suggested crime was higher than they previously let on in 2022. I’m shocked by that.”

It’s true that the FBI’s press release on its latest report didn’t mention the revisions — but such revisions are frequently made, Asher noted, and press releases aren’t sent out about the methodology.

Gelb told us that the FBI “could’ve handled this much better” and “the way that it’s playing out does undermine public confidence.” But “there’s no evidence of any political interference from the administration. None whatsoever. The FBI aggregates these numbers that are supplied by state and local law enforcement.” He’s “not aware of a single agency that said, ‘Hey they garbled our numbers.'”

He said the Council on Criminal Justice has found a similar pattern of crime since 2019. “Violent crimes increased, particularly homicide, during the first couple years of the pandemic,” he said, and then have been decreasing back to the pre-pandemic levels. The opposite happened with property crimes. They went down early in the pandemic, as people stayed home more and stores were closed, making burglaries more difficult, and then property crimes returned as shops opened and people went back to work. An “honest evaluation,” Gelb said, would “look at the broader trend, not two years in middle.”

“There’s no conspiracy, there’s no attempt to deceive, there are not unprecedented stealth changes being suddenly made, the FBI didn’t suddenly ‘find’ a ton of crime,” Asher wrote in his Oct. 21 Substack post.

And despite the revisions, the overall crime trend hasn’t changed.

“We’ve got a lot of sources all pointing in the same direction,” Asher told us. Even if the FBI figures for 2023, and 2024, are later revised up, “we’re still looking at an enormous decrease in murder.”

---

Editor’s note: FactCheck.org does not accept advertising. We rely on grants and individual donations from people like you. Please consider a donation. Credit card donations may be made through our “Donate” page. If you prefer to give by check, send to: FactCheck.org, Annenberg Public Policy Center, 202 S. 36th St., Philadelphia, PA 19104. 

The post Crime Stats Still Show a Decline Since 2020 appeared first on FactCheck.org.