Rates for 11 of the 12 offenses CCJ covered in its report were lower in the first half of 2024 than in the first half of 2023. One crime of any kind is too many, of course, and even five years ago the United States was unacceptably violence-prone. Still, those who are genuinely interested in eliminating crime, as opposed to exploiting the issue for political purposes, will take heart in the new trends and study them for hints about which anti-crime policies do and do not work.
Alas, many in politics are interested in exploiting the issue. Former president Donald Trump told a rally in March that “crime is rampant and out of control like never before,” and doubled down on that alarmist message by telling the Republican National Convention that “our crime rate is going up.” Political rhetoric interacts with the public’s long-standing tendency to believe the worst about crime, which is why Mr. Trump is not the only politician to play this game. Twenty-three out of 27 Gallup polls conducted since 1993 showed that at least three-fifths of American adults believed crime had risen over the previous year, though annual rates actually fell during most of that period.
It would be equally wrong to dismiss public concerns, however; they have a basis in reality. Even with the recent improvements, it is undeniable that crime, including the worst crime — homicide — spiked nationally in recent years. The trauma and insecurity that this caused lingers. In seven U.S. cities that provide data on carjacking, that offense remains 68 percent more frequent than it was in the first half of 2019, according to CCJ’s report. Shoplifting and car theft also remain at elevated levels.
Given the emotions that inevitably swirl around this subject, public opinion will probably never precisely reflect statistical reality. But at least the government could publish a sufficiently precise and up-to-date picture of statistical reality. Unfortunately, it does not, as another recent CCJ report explained. The lead federal source for national data, the FBI, issues annual reports each October based on numbers gathered up to 18 months previously and reported — voluntarily and with varying degrees of accuracy — to the bureau by some 18,000 police agencies. Crime rates are based on two different sources: The National Incident-Based Reporting System, which collects details on crimes reported to law enforcement, and the Bureau of Justice Statistics’ National Crime Victimization Survey, which gathers data directly from individuals about their experiences with crime, whether these incidents were reported to police or not.
In an age of social media and viral video, the government should be able to update the public on crime at least as often as, say, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reports on inflation or unemployment — that is, monthly. Even reports based on a representative sample of jurisdictions would be an improvement over the status quo.
And yet the FBI’s new incident-reporting platform, intended to improve data quality, has made it more time-consuming and complex for police departments to send information to Washington. It has proven especially difficult for small, local agencies, nearly half of which have 10 or fewer officers on staff. As a result, only around two-thirds of the country’s agencies were using it to report incidents as of 2021. Recently, participation in the new system has increased, including large cities such as New York and Los Angeles. The CCJ predicts that it will cover 83 percent of the population this year.
Still, it will take money and effort to reach 98 percent by 2027, as the CCJ recommends. The Bureau of Justice Statistics gets less money from Congress than almost any other federal statistical agency. Last fiscal year, the bureau received $35 million, far less than the $78 million President Biden had requested and less than the $42 million it received the year prior. The Bureau of Labor Statistics, by contrast, received $698 million. Private groups such as CCJ do important work with their limited resources, as its latest report on crime trends, despite unavoidable data limitations, shows. Keeping citizens fully informed about crime is a public responsibility, however. It deserves public resources to match.
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