The Pervasive Crime Lie
The FBI just released its annual crime statistics report for the United States. The report was filled with good news:
Murder and non-negligent manslaughter decreased 11.6%
Rape saw a 9.4% decrease
Aggravated assault decreased 2.8%
Robbery decreased 0.3%
Hate Crimes decreased 0.6%
Overall, violent crime decreased 3%
That is on top of the good news from the 2022 report, which found:
Murder and non-negligent manslaughter decreased 6.1%
Rape decreased 5.4%
Aggravated assault decreased 1.1%
Overall, violent crime decreased 1.7%
Robbery did increase 1.3% in 2022
The US has reached the lowest violent crime rate in 50 years, and crime continues to decrease significantly in 2024.
This should be a cause for celebration, but it isn’t for some. Republicans have dismissed these reductions in crime during the entire Biden-Harris administration. They don’t want to see a Democratic administration succeeding because that increases the chances that Democrats will win in the upcoming election.
This has caused many in the Republican party, including Donald Trump, to believe the lie that crime is actually rising, not falling, and that major cities aren’t reporting their crime data to the FBI.
It is surprising how long this lie has lasted, given how easy it is for anyone with an internet connection to disprove.
It is difficult to be sure where this lie originated, but one website, The Marshall Project, is routinely referenced as a defense of this falsehood.
At its core, The Marshall Project is a professional-looking site of a non-profit focused on criminal justice. There are likely plenty of factual articles and reports throughout their site. But there is a key one that isn’t: their claims that police data is missing from the FBI database.
They’ve written about it multiple times and it has been picked up by newspapers and the media across the country, including trusted names like Newsweek. The issue is that none of these outlets fact checked The Marshall Project’s data despite it being publicly available.
It doesn’t take much to debunk their claims, such as their claim that over 30% of police agencies didn’t report their data to the FBI in 2022 or 2023. A simple look at the FBI data shows a report rate of 83.3% of agencies in 2022 and 85.2% in 2023, which covered 93.5% and 94.3% of the US population, respectively. That is very much in line with the report rate for 2020, which saw 85.4% of agencies report their data, covering 95.2% of the population.
An additional claim is that major cities like Los Angeles, New Orleans, Chicago, and New York City aren’t reporting their data, and yet again you can access the FBI crime database and see that all of these cities reported their data for 2022 and 2023.
Proper journalists would have verified this data before including it in their articles, but they didn’t. They took a website at face value and propagated a lie to millions of Americans. Despite how easy it is to debunk the lie, convincing people who have already bought into it that it is false is much more complicated.
The background of the lie can help clarify the misinformation. The FBI has two reporting systems for crime: the Summary Reporting System and the National Incident-Based Reporting System. NIBRS is a modern system capable of taking a wider range of data about each crime and creating additional insights into what is happening across the country, whereas the much older SRS handles far less data beyond the crime itself.
The FBI has long pushed for police agencies to fully switch over to the new system and in 2021 decided they would try to force that changeover by not allowing agencies to report on SRS. The problem was several agencies weren’t ready for the switchover, including major cities like New Orleans, Los Angeles, and Chicago, so the report rate was down to around 70% in 2021. In response to that result, the FBI went back to allowing reports on both systems for 2022 and beyond, which brought the report rate back up to normal.
It appears that The Marshall Project ignored the reports coming in on the old system for 2022 and 2023, which is why they list a much lower report rate and still believe major cities are missing as some, including New Orleans, are still reporting on the old system.
Given that the FBI puts out annual reports showing the participation rate along with which system reports came in, and you can access the participation rate directly on the interactive crime data website, it seems unlikely that this is simply an oversite by The Marshall Project. It appears to be deliberate misinformation.
There are other aspects of the lie that show up in online discussions.
One claim is that reporting crime data to the FBI used to be mandatory until President Biden made it optional in 2021. It has always been optional, there is no truth to that claim.
Another claim is that it isn’t about cities not reporting their data to the FBI; it is that those cities are no longer prosecuting crimes, which caused crime rates to decrease. This also isn’t true and the easiest way to prove that is with homicides. No city can get away with pretending homicides aren’t happening, there would be far too much of an outcry from the friends and families of homicide victims. The homicide rate has fallen significantly over the last few years.
This article won’t suddenly make the lie disappear, but it does provide context and information for anyone who runs into this lie and wants to set the record straight.
The fact is that crime has been falling since 2022 and it has dropped a significant amount. And that is something we should all be happy to hear.
https://cde.ucr.cjis.gov/
https://cde.ucr.cjis.gov/LATEST/webapp/#/pages/explorer/crime/special-reports
https://www.themarshallproject.org/2023/07/13/fbi-crime-rates-data-gap-nibrs
