"The survey of 70 responding law enforcement agencies compared crime statistics from the first half of 2021 to the same period in 2022, a time when the COVID-19 crisis had waned, lessening the factors that contributed to violent crime rising nationally in 2020 for the first time in four years."
Take this reporting with a very small grain of salt. For one, it's a survey which admits in the footnotes that it's built on preliminary data. They're comparing preliminary data of 2022 with non-preliminary data from 2021. It's also coming from self-reporting, where MCCA is a politically charged organization with non-independent motivations, considering it's an organization of police chiefs.
Consider that a lot of the police agencies in the MCCA survey have failed to to submit statistics to the FBI [1]. That's back from 2021, but I just had a look at its Q3 2022 data and it's missing Chicago and New York city [2]! It's hard to trust any sort of survey like what came out of MCCA when its largest members consistently fail to report crime statistics data.
And.. police aren't exactly good with data analysis [3]
[1] https://www.themarshallproject.org/2022/06/14/what-did-fbi-d...
[2] https://s3-us-gov-west-1.amazonaws.com/cg-d4b776d0-d898-4153...
[3] https://www.chicagoreporter.com/chicago-police-arrested-more...