Trust me, I'm oddly familiar with the country this used to be. Go back and read some primary sources - there are a lot here:

http://unz.org/

Crime statistics in the USA have actually fallen a lot recently. What's your explanation of this? You didn't by any chance watch The Wire? You don't by any chance read the New York Times?

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/08/nyregion/no-room-for-disse...

The former captains spoke of an unrelenting, often unethical pressure to manipulate crime statistics. In addition, the professors studied police and health data and found weird divergences. City hospital data shows a 90 percent increase in emergency room visits for assaults from 1999 to 2006. But police data for the same period records a nearly 50 percent decrease in assaults.

See also:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodharts_law