The U.S. crime rate is still dropping, FBI data shows | Hacker News Reader

The U.S. crime rate is still dropping, FBI data shows

nbcnews.com

56 pointspaulpauper84 comments

I was linked an article [0] claiming that "the federal government has two ways of measuring crime, the Bureau of Justice Statistics’ National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS) and the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s (FBI) Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR) program. The former asks around 240,000 Americans if they’ve been the victim of a crime in the last year whereas the latter relies on crimes reported to police in a given year and shared with the bureau.

A gap has emerged between the two measures. More people are telling the Bureau of Justice Statistics that they’ve been victimized, but the FBI is reporting fewer crimes."

The article goes on to say that "the UCR reported that violent crime fell by 2% between 2021 and 2022" and yet "the NCVS found that the number of people saying they were the victims of violent crimes increased by 42.4% between 2021 and 2022, rising from 16.5 victimizations per 1000 people to 23.5 victimizations per 1000."

Does anyone have more information on the accuracy of that claim?

As a personal anecdote, my car was broken into last year and I did not bother filing a police report.

[0] https://dailycaller.com/2024/04/25/media-outlets-misrepresen...

An interesting analysis, but do you have links to the primary sources or to a more credible source than the Daily Caller?

> As a personal anecdote, my car was broken into last year and I did not bother filing a police report.

What does that represent? Not only are you just one person, people have been behaving like that for generations, not just the last 4 years.

What would you hope to gain from a “more reliable” source when the DailyCaller article links to the sources of its claims? Do you not even bother to read something if it’s from a source you don’t frequently read?

If you carefully pick the start and end dates, you can report a 42% increase in a (noisy but) essentially flat line. See the other comment by ajross below, or go look at the chart yourself. The problem here is the interpretation of the data.

They carefully picked the most recent data available, and interpreted it correctly.

The media is reporting that the public perception is that crime is going up when it is going down, but if the victimization survey is correct, the public perception is that crime is going up when it is going up.

That doesn't mean the public perception hasn't been wrong in the past - it has - but it wasn't wrong during the period of the most recent available data, again, if the victimization survey rather than the FBI data is correct.

> Do you not even bother to read something if it’s from a source you don’t frequently read?

I don't read disinformation sources. It's a waste of time, hoping that this time, it might be different.

If someone who has misinformed me 10,000 times sends me an email with information, I don't take the time to look into it.

I've never heard of this site but the about us starts with:

> Founded in 2010 by Tucker Carlson

The homepage has a headline of "Owning the libs" and the paid members section seem to be called "Patriots".

Clearly there's some different agenda besides reporting the news. This is a low budget version of something like Breitbart and I won't bother reading the article.

Between 2021 and 2022 the rate of violent victimization reporting to police dropped from 46% to 42%. Data is not yet available for 2023:

https://bjs.ojp.gov/library/publications/criminal-victimizat...

The pre-pandemic, pre-George Floyd norm was around 46-47%:

https://bjs.ojp.gov/library/publications/criminal-victimizat...

>No statistically significant change was detected in the percentages of violent crime reported to police from 2014 (46%) to 2015 (47%)

How does one have an official source of "A crime was done to me but I just decided to not call the police"

You call them. That's what the NCVS does.

At least in Seattle it's become notably more common in the past handful of years for people to not bother reporting many crimes, knowing that the police will not even show up for most of them.

This was not true 5-10 years ago.

How do you know?

It was true 30 years ago, it took most people at least 20 years to take a hint.

Local and state level crime reporting tracks the FBI's data though. Also the Daily Caller is (as you might expect from a partisan source) spinning the data pretty badly. Here's the actual report they linked to justify that "42.4% increase": https://bjs.ojp.gov/document/cv22.pdf

Look at the chart. It's been basically basically flat, with some noise, for the past 16-17 years. But indeed, there's a fairly big noise bump at the very last data point. (Or alternatively you could look at 2022 as a return to the mean following two years of depressed crime statistics during the pandemic?)

It's cherry-picking, basically.

While also anecdotal, I know of multiple cases in Seattle of serious crime not being reported in recent years because of a widespread and often valid perception that the police no longer respond to most crimes. People complained about the police pre-COVID but at least they usually showed up, eventually. Whether or not it is true, there is definitely a perception that calling the police has reliably become a waste of time in most cases for crimes they used to respond to, and people's behavior has changed to reflect that.

Same here for San Francisco

I know the perception is that the police don’t care anymore. Bo surprise these are diverging and that no one trusts anything put out by the government anymore anyway

>As a personal anecdote, my car was broken into last year and I did not bother filing a police report.

"The thing I have noticed is when the anecdotes and the data disagree, the anecdotes are usually right. There's something wrong with the way you are measuring it". —Jeff Bezos <https://sports.yahoo.com/amazon-ceo-jeff-bezos-explains-2123...>

I'm not going to argue the statistics because obviously I don't have all the data, but I do have to wonder how much (if any) attribution goes to people giving up on the police?

"Why bother, they won't do anything" has become a rather common phrase I've heard a lot in the past few years, from family to random retail workers, but I'm unsure if that sentiment is growing or not.

* Adding due to replies, what I thought may be obvious - the phrase above is never referring to murders, usually property crimes.

Sure, that makes more sense than the fact that most people who are at the age where one would normally conduct criminal mischief are now glued to their phones. Murder and violent crimes are both dropping year over year, too. Not sure how you wave away murder rates because people have given up on police.

Its not because they are glued to their phones, its because those kids that parents didn't want to have, weren't had and didn't become latchkey kids and then criminals.

https://freakonomics.com/podcast/abortion-and-crime-revisite...

Well, maybe.

https://journalistsresource.org/economics/abortion-crime-res...

We're not talking about historical crime rates. We're talking about recent ones. Yes, crime rates became lower than women stopped having unwanted children, but that has nothing to do with the recent decrease in violent crimes.

Which once past, and measured is history... the trends continue

> I do have to wonder how much (if any) attribution goes to people giving up on the police?

If so, they've been giving up on the police for at least 2 decades.

    Violent crime has been falling since early 90s https://www.statista.com/statistics/191219/reported-violent-crime-rate-in-the-usa-since-1990/

    Property crime has been falling since early 90s https://www.deepsentinel.com/blogs/home-security/residential-property-crime-in-the-united-states/

Murders, at least, tend to be reported regardless of people's confidence that the police will solve the case.

But there's a huge difference between murder and petty crime. Just because murders decrease because e.g. less lead in the environment, doesn't necessarily mean that petty crime also decreased. This doesn't pass the necessary/sufficient test.

Murders are down 13% year over year, that's probably not a lead-reduction effect.

The point is, motivations to murder versus petty crime are way different. Just because murders are down, I don't think it's necessary that petty crime is also down.

True! That could be chalked up (yuk yuk) to needing to otherwise dispose of a dead body.

My friend got robbed in NYC. The only reason he called the police was to get a police report for insurance reasons. They came 8 hours after he called. Obviously they're not going to do anything about it. If it wasn't needed for insurance, there would be absolutely no reason to call them.

That's the interesting bit for me.

I DO believe people are calling the police less for crime, even violent crime.

However, how do you have an official source of "I decided not to call the cops".

A coworker of mine was punched on NYCT. Went to the cop in the station, who did nothing, and was sore for a week. This is a case where it was ‘reported’, but the cop said they couldn’t do anything if he wasn’t seriously hurt. My other NY coworkers have similar stories of other people they know.

Maybe random minor violence is up, but major violence is down… but the number of people I’ve heard of getting assaulted has definitely increased since COVID.

The number of ‘we can’t do anything’ stories I’ve heard have skyrocketed. If anything pre-Covid cops were to quick to go after people. I got jumped after high school by kids I didn’t know and just got a black eye; the cops went and roughed up the gang of guys based purely on me saying ‘that’s them’ as we drove past.

Is the expectation that police should assault people at the direction of individuals?

>"Why bother, they won't do anything" has become a rather common phrase I've heard a lot in the past few years, from family to random retail workers, but I'm unsure if that sentiment is growing or not.

What kind of crime are people so commonly being victims of around you?

Edited original comment, but each of the instances I was thinking of was related to theft, whether personal or shoplifting.

assaults

I reported a theft of a high value item to the police once. I went to the their office, gave details of what happened, and I never heard back from them. I won't bother making another report.

The NYPD struggles to find subway shooters*, investigating a theft is probably something beyond their abilities.

* https://abcnews.go.com/US/nyc-police-search-gunman-brooklyn-...

Crime reporting is down too, especially in cities which have progressive prosecutors and significant police staffing problems such as Portland, OR, Pittsburgh, PA, and Burlington, VT. I'll wait for the 2023 National Criminal Victimization Survey before declaring victory on this one:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Crime_Victimization_S...

That survey gathers data from participants directly instead of relying on reports collected via law enforcement. As of the 2022 report, the latest period for which such data is available, violent victimization was rising:

https://bjs.ojp.gov/library/publications/list?series_filter=...

Crime goes down when unwanted kids that would have become criminals aren't born. https://freakonomics.com/podcast/abortion-and-crime-revisite...

Expect regressive states to have an explosion in crime over the next few decades.

Social media has improved awareness of crime, and this is where most people derive their intuitive measures of crime.

Yeah, footage of crime goes viral, but this also creates perception that crime is worse than it really is. given 200 million Americans with a smart phone and social media accounts, there will always be crime somewhere being recorded. This does not mean the perps in those videos do not get caught later even if they appear in the video to have gotten away.

The media has always greatly amplified perception of crime.

In the 80s and 90s for instance daytime TV convinced parents that pedophile abductors were stealing kids everywhere when in reality these crimes were and are statistically extremely rare.

Depends on whether the story is dramatic enough to report it. Video of small-time property crimes that would have otherwise been ignored by the media are now getting attention. If someone stole a package from a porch in the 90s, nobody would have covered it. Now, if you have a dramatic doorbell video, it'll get attention.

That's my point. Everyone and their dog has a ring doorbell now. Property crime was definitely worse in the 80s and 90s, but you'd only hear about it through the grapevine.

> Everyone and their dog has a ring doorbell now

You might be living in a bubble.

You might be incapable of recognizing hyperbole. I am saying that home security cameras are popular. They are, and videos from them are regularly shared in local news stories and on social media.

Stats I’m seeing put it north of a quarter of households with video doorbells, and rising. Not literally everyone, but a whole lot. I’d say more than half the houses in my middle-class suburban non-tech-hub-city neighborhood have one, and this isn’t some early-adopter gadget nerd crowd.

(for the record, we don’t have one)

From the data we see that violent crime has dropped across the board but property crime is up 3% between Q4 2022 and Q4 2023 for cities with a population of a million or more. The article asks “Why does the public think it’s going up?” Well, because it is in major cities.

I won’t even mention the additional factors of the 24 hour news cycle, social media, and people losing faith in officials prosecuting crimes like shoplifting or car jacking leading to less reporting. The raw data says property crime is up in major cities, and property crime is the crime that makes people feel unsafe or that there is disorder (as the “expert” in the article refers to).

Yet, a pretty consistent majority of people, regardless of where they live, say they think crime is increasing locally.

https://datawrapper.dwcdn.net/NOZAB/3/#

Sure, but the same is true for angels. https://www.pbs.org/newshour/nation/nearly-7-in-10-u-s-adult...

> property crime is up 3% between Q4 2022 and Q4 2023

I doubt people would notice 3%, though arguably it could have been 'too high' to begin with.

Here in SoCal crime is the worst we've seen since the 90's. Property crime is rampant, tons of shootings, assaults etc, just in my local area. Not only that, DA's are not prosecuting criminals, therefore police aren't arresting people due to this.

Can you cite a source that shows it's the worst since the 90s?

Isn't this guy quite literally a primary source?

Quite the opposite: notice how they carefully avoided saying anything quantifiable? Southern California is a huge region covering tens of thousands of square miles and over 20 million residents – how could any single person claim to be a primary source for even 1% of that?

Data shows that, but feelings don't. It's always going to be a losing battle.

It depends on who's in office, and who the media and political groups want to rile up.

You're describing symptoms as the disease. People elect officials, sustain media outlets that support their viewership's confirmation biases, and organize by tribal beliefs. People are the messy, complicated root cause. New symptoms will always emerge, regardless of how much focus/treatment they get. Symptoms can sometimes look like a cabal. But they aren't. The root is normal people.

That’s leaving out a key problem: this is not happening in a vacuum, with perfectly spherical cows randomly distributed. Because those ejections have a broad variety of consequences, there is a ton of money to be made shaping public opinion and billions of dollars is spent doing so.

Much of the conservative agenda consists of positions which poll in the 30-40% range but the groups of people backing those positions are extremely motivated, so you get entire media operations (not just Fox News) devoted to pushing the most popular points trying to get people to vote for the entire ticket. Crime is really popular there because it gets people scared, and scared people don’t think long-term: maybe you don’t really hate gay people, think abortion should be up to doctors, feel that we should do something about climate change, think rich people should pay taxes at the same rate you do, etc. – those are all positions a majority of Americans take – but none of those are really affecting you personally right now, whereas you keep hearing about these carjackings and other violent crimes which could, so you vote for the guy who will definitely go against all of those other long-term things because he’s promising to do something about the immediate scary thing.

Sure, it's all feelings. We just need to tell people they're actually safe! Let's get the data out there!

The article takes the data as gospel but the sources are not disinterested. There are significant trends in both the probability of crime and of a crime being reported. And there have been recent significant changes to how those stats are collected. If you see a clear signal in the data it may be because you haven't had a chance to spelunk into the details.

https://www.city-journal.org/article/urban-crime-wave

> the sources are not disinterested

The link you provide is from a political advocacy group largely funded by corporate donors. The front page of the journal principally comprises anti-diversity & crime trutherism articles. It's conservative, but even that conservative bent is narrowly focused to agitate against the fall in crime rates and against any diversity effort.

This is not a disinterested source.

I agree, I offer it for balance. If you can find a disinterested source I'd be interested in their findings.

A study posted here yesterday, had the interesting statistic that the “clearance rate” i.e. percent of crimes solved by the police - when reported - is down drastically in recent years, a trend that seems to have started long before covid:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40223240 (note, flagged, although not clear to me why)

This might explain part of the growing frustration and questions about the veracity of the reporting data.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/oct/22/us-crime-sta...

Just to point out, there's the subject of whether crime is reported. And then there's the subject of whether local agencies pass along that information to the FBI. So the FBI stats even on murder aren't complete.

Didn’t a lot of cities either redefine crime or just stopped recording?

I’m in Bay Area and SF basically over the past decade or so has made it okay to commit crime.

And if I question anything I’m the bad guy.

> And if I question anything I’m the bad guy.

That's surprising to hear, because people with your approximate beliefs dominate the public conversation, have recalled the DA, and are spending large amounts of money to take over SF politics.

Why is it necessary to play the victim? Are you afraid of people disagreeing?

People on the street vs tweets and actions of tech billionaires.

And yes I’m afraid of the communists who run around in SF condoning actual international terrorists, and group up to defend local criminals almost on the daily from facing consequences for their malbehavior.

I'm not sure how that threatens you personally? Has anyone been attacked?

Endlessly attacking people you disagree with doesn't add credibility or make any of it true.

I feel fearful voicing my opinion IRL. I didn't realize I need to be hacked or knifed myself in order to "not be threatened". But sure, keep stealing my stuff, breaking into my friends' cars, beating my friend, beating up our elderly (SF doesn't care about Asians and that's a fact), illegal side shows and shooting a infant, and stealing from stores. And so on.

The consequence for these actions? These people who commit the crimes are let out ASAP and go back to committing more crime.

And if someone says something or God forbid reacts to stopping bad behavior as we have seen, mobs of these people show up and harass people who want to live in a good society.

Let's ignore the lack of evidence for the extreme claims (the fact that they are commonplace claims doesn't make them true).

> I didn't realize I need to be hacked or knifed myself in order to "not be threatened".

Did someone say that?

> And if someone says something or God forbid reacts to stopping bad behavior as we have seen, mobs of these people show up and harass people who want to live in a good society.

My question was, has anyone been attacked for expressing those views. This sentence seems to say they have - is there evidence of it happening?

Yes. There’s that Asian rapper who spoke up about the DA and immediately got ganged up on to apologize.

And just today 2 more elderly Asians were attacked.

Thanks to people like you who deflect and ask questions like this, we keep suffering. Thank you! Keep it up and making things worse.

Cheers dude. Have a good life or whatever.

> There’s that Asian rapper who spoke up about the DA and immediately got ganged up on to apologize.

You said you were afraid to express your opinion and implied (maybe my misunderstanding) some physical risk. Has anyone been physically attacked for it? I'm starting to think otherwise.

> 2 more elderly Asians were attacked

How does that threaten you for expressing your opinions? Also, in a large city, some are attacked every day; is there evidence of elderly Asian people experiencing particularly high crime?

> Thanks to people like you

That's way out of bounds on HN. You seem to be the person doing the attacking - and in fact taking the 'victim' position is often used as a justification for that.

You did the meme.

https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/smugjak-but-how-does-this-aff...

In my experience, people who don't read serious news almost all repeat neoreactionary talking points (including chaos in the cities, etc.). I was even talking to someone from Ghana the other day who said people in Ghana also repeat those things about the US - e.g., how crazy NYC is.

The correlation between neoreactionary disinformation campaigns (e.g., chaos in cities was the theme of the 2020 GOP convention, though overshadowed by Covid) and people's beliefs are too great to think it's coincidence.

The neoreactionary influence campaigns dominate the country and much of the world, IME. While the mainstream incumbent powers are living in a fantasy world of their now-historical world, a world where the serious news media being central to public conversation. They don't realize that most of the real influence is happening over social media, through these disinformation campaigns.

I suspect the upcoming election will be a devestating loss - but not an awakening. Incumbents (think of Blackberry in technology) will crew their ship to the bottom of the ocean.

Less kids playing outside.

That is perception of crime, not actual crime.

No. The kids literally aren’t outside. So they have less interaction. They commit less crime.

Kids playing outside are committing crimes? And they don't commit crimes because they aren't outside - as if that would stop someone from robbing a store?

It's physically impossible to rob a store if you're at home playing video games.

Being at home means they're not at a store. They're mutually exclusive.

Yup. Crime numbers go down when you ignore crimes.

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