Right now we are hearing that crime—especially homicide—is falling (just like inflation—heh), suggesting that the runaway crime of recent years was somehow an epiphenomena of Covid. Here’s the chart getting wide circulation:
These data are likely correct, but there is reason to doubt that crime overall is falling, for the simple reason that lots of people have lost confidence in law enforcement and prosecution and no longer report many crimes (especially property crimes) to the police.
Writing in the Wall Street Journal today, John Lott notes the important and growing discrepancy between the official FBI crime statistics derived from police reporting, and crime victim reports, which are conducted separately:
The U.S. has two measures of crime. The Federal Bureau of Investigation’s Uniform Crime Reporting program counts the number of crimes reported to police every year. The Bureau of Justice Statistics, in its National Crime Victimization Survey, asks some 240,000 people a year whether they have been victims of a crime. The two measures have diverged since 2020: The FBI has been reporting less crime, while more people say they have been victims.
The divergence is due to several reasons. In 2022, 31% of police departments nationwide, including Los Angeles and New York, didn’t report crime data to the FBI. In addition, in cities from Baltimore to Nashville, Tenn., the FBI is undercounting crimes those jurisdictions reported.
Another reason crimes reported to the police are falling is that arrest rates are plummeting. If victims don’t believe criminals will be caught and punished, they won’t bother reporting them. According to the FBI, if you take the five years preceding Covid-19 (2015-19) and compare them with 2022, the percentage of violent crimes in all cities resulting in an arrest fell from 44% to 35%. Among cities with more than one million people (where violent crime disproportionately occurs), arrest rates over the same period plunged from 44% to 20%.
Sounds a lot like the fishy employment numbers we get from the government every month.
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