Last month, the Biden Administration released a statement celebrating a “record decrease in crime in 2023.” The statement claimed “the FBI released data showing that crime declined across nearly every category in 2023.”
“Last year, we also had one of the lowest rates of all violent crime in more than 50 years and the murder rate saw the sharpest decrease in history. That’s good news for the American people,” the Biden Administration boasted.
But now, a report from The Washington Examiner is casting doubt on the administration’s crime claim and explaining why many Americans are still feeling unsafe in their communities.
The FBI’s preliminary 2023 data showed murder declined by 13.2% across the country and violent crime dropped 5.7% compared to 2022 levels — but it’s how the data was reported that’s the problem, The Examiner says.
From The Examiner:
Part of the problem is how police departments report offenses to the FBI. The FBI asked, then demanded, that law enforcement agencies “transition” away from the system they used for decades to a new, more detailed but onerous one. The 2021 mandate to use NIBRS to submit crime data proved a disaster as overstretched departments, especially in large cities, failed to reach compliance and thus did not submit data.
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. Chicago, Los Angeles, and New York City all failed to submit crime data. To increase participation, the FBI relaxed the NIBRS requirement in 2022, allowing agencies to report via the legacy system.
But many other cities, such as St. Louis, which had transitioned to the new method, still struggle to comply and submit partial or faulty data. The FBI compensates by relying more heavily on “estimation,”or informed guesswork, to fill in the gaps and produce aggregated data.
…
That underreporting reduces the reliability of FBI numbers in measuring actual offense levels. For example, robbery offenses, which constitute roughly 25% of all violent crime by volume compared to 5% for murder, declined 18% between 2019 and 2022, according to the FBI, while the victim’s survey suggests a 30% rise.
So, when Biden says “Keeping communities safe is my priority” — he may actually mean the appearance of keeping communities safe is his priority
