Crime is perhaps the perfect issue on which unscrupulous politicians can focus. Americans perennially have a sense that crime is rising in the country, if not in their own neighborhoods. The lack of quality, real-time national data on crime makes it easy to cherry-pick specific, alarming incidents or to allege increases in crime that are hard to dismiss as invented.
In other words, crime is a perfect issue for Donald Trump.
Since he first emerged as a dominant force in Republican politics, Trump has suggested that crime is surging, or will surge under the leadership of whichever opponent is in his sights. As the 2020 presidential campaign unfolded, with Trump running for reelection, his campaign used imagery of criminal acts that had occurred during his own tenure to suggest that electing Joe Biden would somehow be worse.
Despite such elegant political rhetoric, Trump lost that election. But as his 2024 campaign has geared up, he’s again raising the specter of a surge in crime as an argument to return him to the White House. He’s had the steady assistance of his allies in promoting the idea that crime rose under Biden’s tenure; Fox News in particular has done its best to convince Americans that crime is spiking. Trump’s use of the term “migrant crime” — an effort to blend concerns about immigration with concerns about violence — can be credited in no small part to Fox News’s airwaves.
(It can also be credited to New York City’s former police commissioner, Edward Caban, who recently resigned after the FBI seized electronic devices as part of a federal corruption investigation. We should probably also note that Trump himself does not have a spotless criminal record.)
At his debate with Vice President Kamala Harris this month, Trump attempted to suggest that violent crime had risen under Biden’s (and, by extension, Harris’s) administration. The debate moderators quickly pointed out that FBI data, collected from law enforcement agencies across the country, showed that violent crime had actually fallen since Trump left office.
Data released by the FBI on Monday reinforces that drop. The number of violent crimes, property crimes and homicides are all down relative to 2020 — a year in which violent crime (and homicide in particular) jumped.
Trump’s allies, including those on Fox News, are quick to note that the FBI report, relying on data from police departments around the country, is incomplete. That’s technically true, though the new data is from organizations covering more than 94 percent of the American population. Between 2020 and 2021, the FBI changed its data collection process, leading to much lower response rates that year, which can be seen in the chart above. The newest release, though, doesn’t have a similar problem.
There are other measures of crime that comport with the FBI data. The Real-Time Crime Index compiled by the firm AH Datalytics, for example, uses self-reporting from law enforcement agencies to compile information about crime much more quickly than the FBI’s effort (which, you’ll notice, resulted in the release of 2023 annual data in September 2024). It, too, shows declines in violent crime and homicide over the past few years.
Trump and his allies have pointed to a different metric, the Bureau of Justice Statistics’ (BJS) measure of crime victimization. Instead of measuring crimes reported to police, the BJS data relies on a national survey conducted by the Census Bureau. Its data suggest that victimization increased in 2022 relative to 2021, and that rates in 2023 were higher than in 2020.
You’ll notice that this doesn’t match what the FBI found. The lower line above, for example, shows rates of violent crime reported to the police. But actual police data shows a drop from 2020 to 2023, rather than a big jump.
What’s more, the BJS data suggest that a higher percentage of violent crime was reported to police in 2023 than in 2020.
Trump would have us focus on this self-reported measure of crime rather than actual crime data. Interestingly, back in 2022 when Fox News and others on the right were obsessing over crime (at least until the midterm elections), the then-most-recent BJS data showed a drop in crime victimization rates. Incidentally, the most-recent BJS data also shows that victimization (excluding simple assault) dropped between 2022 and 2023 in urban areas. It climbed in rural ones.
No data from the FBI will dissuade Trump from claiming that crime has increased or is increasing; he had no non-anecdotal evidence to suggest that it had in the first place. The most comprehensive official tally by the government shows that crime is down. Data like AH Datalytics’ suggests that has continued into 2024.
Trump likes to ask if Americans better off than they were four years ago. Fewer are getting murdered, which is one plus, certainly.
