Jeff, you touched on this but let's be clear and specific about WHY "crime" is a political issue in the US.
Republican conservative politicians want to keep people defensive and afraid of The Other - afraid of the BogeyMan du Jour, who is almost always a minority and usually non-White/non-Christian. Demagogues like Biggs and Jordan are bent on finding something, anything that they can use to frighten voters even if/when they have to make it up (pronounced, "lie").
The fact is that every type of US crime has steadily dropped since the early 90's. Both Violent and Property crime rates are at a fraction of those 90's peaks. It is also a fact that (R) pols ignore that data showing dropping crime and, when they can't ignore it, they tried to impugn the accuracy of the data. As you note, due to our historical (underfunded) approach to tracking crime, the data is imperfect. However, it has been consistently imperfect for decades, thus it provides a clear picture of crime rate change over time.
There WAS a brief increase in Assault and Homicide during peak Covid stress when folks were spending more time together in close quarters and there was a hate-spewing sociopath in the WH. When Covid eased and we elected a sane, responsible person as President, Violent crime began dropping to the pre-Covid trend lines.
The reality is that the odds of a random American being the random victim of crime perpetrated by the random Bad Guy in the US are extremely low. A significant %age of Violent crime occurs in a handful of historically violent zip codes and tends to occur between people who are socially acquainted, including among family members. However, (R) pols and our copycat, clickbait media mislead citizens and exaggerate the actual risks of crime.
With the exception of gun crime, US crime data is roughly similar to crime in our peer, European nations. We do suffer far more gun crime due to the high number of guns in the US and (R)s' unwillingness to support the reasonable, sane gun laws that are favored by the majority of US citizens.
Overall crime statistics and what we see in our local papers don't always mirror each other either. The media make money from reporting every police call out it seems so it feels much worse than it is.
The only crimes where the FBI numbers accurately represent real crime are murder, bullet wounds requiring treatment, and car theft. FBI stats based on "reported" crime. Nobody reports robbery, burglary, muggings, assault, etc. In recent years "unreported" has grown to dwarf "reported" crime. You know this is true for the following glaring reasons:
1.Police response times are up hours.
2.Police arrests are through the floor.
3.Successful prosecutions have fallen even further.
4.At least 65% of felonies have been reduced to misdemeanors or no crime.
5.With zero dollar bail, the bad guy is back in your face with in an hour of the crime.
6.Shop lifting or stealing less than $1,000 is not a felony. Stores do not close and leave because crime is decreasing.
7.Using or selling common drugs that accounted for a significant portion of "reported" crime are no longer crimes.
8.Compare the FBI reported crimes with the 355,000 shots fired per year in Chicago. Each one of those is a robbery or a threat against a human being with an illegal weapon.
Please advise which of the above are not causing victims and witnesses to stop reporting crime.
Hi Jeff: This is from a draft article on FBI data:
There are three conclusions from the exchange above:
1 The great majority of crimes are not reported to law enforcement and are not included in FBI statistics.
2 The FBI is recording multiple crimes for incidents that they are not including in reports. This is based on a 2019 FBI report that ten percent of reported incidents include more than one crime. For whatever it's worth, it's been my experience that many crime incidents involve multiple criminal charges, far more than 10 percent. However, the FBI is still recording only primary crimes under the hierarchy rule thus excluding multiple crimes per incident.
3. The FBI's National Incident-Based Reporting System is dramatically improving the rate of involvement from law enforcement thus increasing the probability of improved crime reports.
I do not know how to resolve the NIBRS's effort to collect up to ten separate offenses per incident without impacting or increasing crime numbers. As a police officer, if I apprehended a burglary suspect, he was charged with multiple crimes (i.e., burglary, breaking and entering, possession of burglary tools, trespassing, possession of stolen items) and prosecutors would decide what charges remained for the plea-bargaining process.
When I reviewed the case files of hundreds of convicted offenders, multiple charges per incident were routine. In 2019, the FBI’s UCR Program did a study, Effects of NIBRS on Crime Statistics that showed nearly 90 percent of the incidents submitted to the FBI’s UCR Program involved only one offense. I do not know how to interpret this finding based on my own experience.
As I stated, it's my experience that far more than ten percent of criminal incidents involve multiple crimes, thus it's possible that the FBI is not counting or reporting a ton of crimes for its reports from law enforcement.
The FBI is stating that for many reports, they are using the hierarchy rule; they are only recording the most serious incidents, not the multiple crimes per incident.
The lesson? The use of FBI data is immensely complex. Some issues need to be addressed. If the hierarchy rule remains for the majority of FBI crime reports, we will not get an accurate count of crime. Increases (excluding homicides) "could" be decreases for a variety of reasons.
Counterarguments are welcomed but most of this (except the issue of the percentage of crime not reported) is based on email exchanges via the FBI. I'll offer the article in early January.
Jeff, you touched on this but let's be clear and specific about WHY "crime" is a political issue in the US.
Republican conservative politicians want to keep people defensive and afraid of The Other - afraid of the BogeyMan du Jour, who is almost always a minority and usually non-White/non-Christian. Demagogues like Biggs and Jordan are bent on finding something, anything that they can use to frighten voters even if/when they have to make it up (pronounced, "lie").
The fact is that every type of US crime has steadily dropped since the early 90's. Both Violent and Property crime rates are at a fraction of those 90's peaks. It is also a fact that (R) pols ignore that data showing dropping crime and, when they can't ignore it, they tried to impugn the accuracy of the data. As you note, due to our historical (underfunded) approach to tracking crime, the data is imperfect. However, it has been consistently imperfect for decades, thus it provides a clear picture of crime rate change over time.
There WAS a brief increase in Assault and Homicide during peak Covid stress when folks were spending more time together in close quarters and there was a hate-spewing sociopath in the WH. When Covid eased and we elected a sane, responsible person as President, Violent crime began dropping to the pre-Covid trend lines.
The reality is that the odds of a random American being the random victim of crime perpetrated by the random Bad Guy in the US are extremely low. A significant %age of Violent crime occurs in a handful of historically violent zip codes and tends to occur between people who are socially acquainted, including among family members. However, (R) pols and our copycat, clickbait media mislead citizens and exaggerate the actual risks of crime.
With the exception of gun crime, US crime data is roughly similar to crime in our peer, European nations. We do suffer far more gun crime due to the high number of guns in the US and (R)s' unwillingness to support the reasonable, sane gun laws that are favored by the majority of US citizens.
Overall crime statistics and what we see in our local papers don't always mirror each other either. The media make money from reporting every police call out it seems so it feels much worse than it is.
The only crimes where the FBI numbers accurately represent real crime are murder, bullet wounds requiring treatment, and car theft. FBI stats based on "reported" crime. Nobody reports robbery, burglary, muggings, assault, etc. In recent years "unreported" has grown to dwarf "reported" crime. You know this is true for the following glaring reasons:
1.Police response times are up hours.
2.Police arrests are through the floor.
3.Successful prosecutions have fallen even further.
4.At least 65% of felonies have been reduced to misdemeanors or no crime.
5.With zero dollar bail, the bad guy is back in your face with in an hour of the crime.
6.Shop lifting or stealing less than $1,000 is not a felony. Stores do not close and leave because crime is decreasing.
7.Using or selling common drugs that accounted for a significant portion of "reported" crime are no longer crimes.
8.Compare the FBI reported crimes with the 355,000 shots fired per year in Chicago. Each one of those is a robbery or a threat against a human being with an illegal weapon.
Please advise which of the above are not causing victims and witnesses to stop reporting crime.
None of your links seem to work
Hi Jeff: This is from a draft article on FBI data:
There are three conclusions from the exchange above:
1 The great majority of crimes are not reported to law enforcement and are not included in FBI statistics.
2 The FBI is recording multiple crimes for incidents that they are not including in reports. This is based on a 2019 FBI report that ten percent of reported incidents include more than one crime. For whatever it's worth, it's been my experience that many crime incidents involve multiple criminal charges, far more than 10 percent. However, the FBI is still recording only primary crimes under the hierarchy rule thus excluding multiple crimes per incident.
3. The FBI's National Incident-Based Reporting System is dramatically improving the rate of involvement from law enforcement thus increasing the probability of improved crime reports.
I do not know how to resolve the NIBRS's effort to collect up to ten separate offenses per incident without impacting or increasing crime numbers. As a police officer, if I apprehended a burglary suspect, he was charged with multiple crimes (i.e., burglary, breaking and entering, possession of burglary tools, trespassing, possession of stolen items) and prosecutors would decide what charges remained for the plea-bargaining process.
When I reviewed the case files of hundreds of convicted offenders, multiple charges per incident were routine. In 2019, the FBI’s UCR Program did a study, Effects of NIBRS on Crime Statistics that showed nearly 90 percent of the incidents submitted to the FBI’s UCR Program involved only one offense. I do not know how to interpret this finding based on my own experience.
As I stated, it's my experience that far more than ten percent of criminal incidents involve multiple crimes, thus it's possible that the FBI is not counting or reporting a ton of crimes for its reports from law enforcement.
The FBI is stating that for many reports, they are using the hierarchy rule; they are only recording the most serious incidents, not the multiple crimes per incident.
The lesson? The use of FBI data is immensely complex. Some issues need to be addressed. If the hierarchy rule remains for the majority of FBI crime reports, we will not get an accurate count of crime. Increases (excluding homicides) "could" be decreases for a variety of reasons.
Counterarguments are welcomed but most of this (except the issue of the percentage of crime not reported) is based on email exchanges via the FBI. I'll offer the article in early January.
Best, Len.
If you haven't already, you might try The Hill. I've had good luck with them and they are pretty centric ideologically.
Is the word "fewer" missing from this sentence
"There were likely more than 5,000 murder victims in 2024 than two years earlier . . ."
Yup, fixed. Thanks!