Buckeye Reporter

In his State of the Union address this year, President Joe Biden stated that “Americans deserve the freedom to be safe, and America is safer today than when I took office,” asserting that “[l]ast year, the murder rate saw the sharpest decrease in history, and violent crime fell to one of the lowest levels in more than 50 years.” This claim has sparked debate about its validity.

Public safety was a significant issue in the 2022 midterm elections and continues to be a key concern as we approach November’s elections. A Pew Research Center survey reports that six in 10 U.S. adults believe reducing crime should be a political priority. The survey also revealed that concerns about crime have risen somewhat in both parties since the start of Biden’s presidency.

Several recent articles from John Lott's Crime Prevention Research Center (CPRC) examine the state of crime and crime reporting. They conclude that factors other than actual crime are contributing to an illusion of safer streets.

Two of these articles evaluate statistics and efforts supporting Biden’s claim that violent crime is falling dramatically. A third article examines reliability issues with the FBI’s reporting of violent crime.

According to CPRC, one factor contributing to an apparent dip in violent crime is that almost 40% of local law enforcement agencies are no longer transmitting their information to the national Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) database. In 2021, 37% of police departments stopped reporting crime data to the FBI, including large departments for Chicago, Los Angeles, and New York. Other jurisdictions like Baltimore and Nashville are underreporting or undercounting crimes.

Another factor undermining the official narrative of less crime is non-reporting or underreporting by victims. Since 1973, the federal National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS) has relied on interviews with a nationally representative sample rather than police statistics. The NCVS data shows that total violent crime — reported and nonreported — rose from 16.5 incidents to 23.5 per 1,000 people in 2022.

The CPRC also examined changes in arrest rates. As arrest rates decline, the number of crimes reported to police falls because if “people don’t think the police will solve their cases, they are less likely to report them to the police.” The CPRC compared violent crime arrest rates in 2022 with arrests for such offenses over the five years before COVID-19 and found that in 2022, the arrest rate across all cities fell by 20%.

The last paper by the CPRC reviewed the FBI’s violent crime statistics by comparing the FBI’s Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR) program with NCVS data collected by another federal agency, the Bureau of Justice Statistics. According to CPRC, from 2008 through 2019, these two measurements were unrelated but have since shifted to an almost perfectly negative correlation.

An article written by a former director of the Bureau of Justice Statistics at the U.S. Department of Justice contradicts President Biden’s claims about record-setting declines in murder rates. Using available data for six large local law enforcement agencies for 2023, he concludes that while these agencies did report declines in homicides from 2022 to 2023, these decreases are not enough to compensate for a significant murder spike from 2019 to 2022.

President Biden's assertion that his policies have made America safer is under scrutiny. If the CPRC and others are correct, there has been no remarkable decline in homicides or even violent crimes generally. Instead, there has been a worrying drop in reporting of crimes to police and reduced arrest rates.