From: AlleyCat <katt@gmail.com>
Newsgroups: alt.fan.rush-limbaugh,can.politics,alt.politics.trump,alt.politics.liberalism,alt.politics.democrats,alt.politics.usa.republican
Subject: When The Police Departments Lie At The Will of The City Councils and Mayors, and Fail to Even Respond To Calls, Statistics Are Hard To Come By...
Date: Fri, 13 Sep 2024 17:55:17 -0500
Organization: AlleyCat Computing, Inc.
... especially when only 83% of Police Departments report crimes to the FBI. - Snopes
Snopes won't even say crime is down. They stay on the periphery.
"At the New York Post: Democrats Are Hiding the Rise in Violent Crime with Tricky Statistics." Crime
Prevention Research Center, 14 Aug. 2024, https://crimeresearch.org/2024/08/at-the-new-york-post-democrats-
are-hiding-the-rise-in-violent-crime-with-tricky-statistics/.
Drawing any kind of conclusion about crime statistics is challenging - statisticians must either estimate for
crime that is NOT REPORTED TO LAW ENFORCEMENT or tabulate statistics on REPORTED CRIME ONLY.
In 2024, the Biden administration repeatedly claimed that violent crime was at a 50-year low, based on FBI
statistics. The FBI defines the following as "violent crime": murder, manslaughter, rape, robbery and
aggravated assault.
On multiple occasions throughout 2024, U.S. President Joe Biden and members of his administration claimed
that the violent crime rate in the United States was at a 50-year low. Biden even included the statistic in
his 2024 State of the Union Address in March:
The year before I took office, murders went up 30% nationwide the biggest increase in history.
(thanks to the Democrats locking everything down)
That was then.
"Now, through my American Rescue Plan, which every Republican voted against, I've made the largest investment
in public safety ever. Last year, the murder rate saw the sharpest decrease in history, and violent crime
fell to one of the lowest levels in more than 50 years."
But as the Biden administration continued to advertise the statistic, former President Donald Trump pushed
back against it, claiming it was an outright lie, and that U.S. crime rates were rising, not falling.
Trump's followers took up his claim and promoted it. When White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre
talked about record-low crime rates in a news conference on Aug. 14, many on social media left comments
stating that the statistic was wrong, alleging that the Biden administration was FAILING TO ACCURATELY RECORD
CRIME and therefore INCORRECT ABOUT THE TRUE CRIME RATE.
The Problem
Collecting accurate statistics on crime is hard, because by definition, committing a crime is illegal.
Perpetrators don't regularly admit to their illegal activities, nor are all crimes reported to law
enforcement authorities. As such, there are various sources that report crime statistics across the U.S.,
each of which has its own shortcomings.
The Biden administration's main source for crime statistics was the FBI, which has been collecting data on
crime for over 100 years through its Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR) program. The program records statistics
for eight different crimes, divided into two categories: Murder and homicide, rape, robbery and aggravated
assault are classified as "violent crimes," while arson, burglary, larceny and motor vehicle theft are
classified as "property crimes." The data on these crimes dating back to 1979 is publicly available through
the FBI's Crime Data Explorer.
Said data strongly suggests that Biden's claim of a 50-year low in violent crime is at least roughly
accurate. However, THERE ARE NOTABLE LIMITATIONS TO THOSE STATISTICS THAT PREVENT US FROM DRAWING A
DEFINITIVE CONCLUSION.
FIRST, THE FBI BROADENED ITS DEFINITION OF RAPE IN 2013, MAKING IT DIFFICULT TO ACCURATELY COMPARE PRE-2013
AND POST-2013 DATA IN THAT CATEGORY.
SECOND, THE WAY THE FBI COLLECTS ITS DATA YIELDS RESULTS THAT UNDERCOUNT THE 'TRUE" FIGURE OF CRIME.
In order for an incident to be included in FBI data, the CRIME MUST BE REPORTED TO A POLICE DEPARTMENT THAT
PARTICIPATES IN THE UCR PROGRAM. Since crime is not always reported to law enforcement (in fact, most crime
goes unreported), THE FBI'S NUMBERS WILL NEVER BE 100% COMPLETE AND ACCURATE using that methodology.
Furthermore, LAW ENFORCEMENT AGENCIES AREN'T REQUIRED TO REPORT THEIR DATA TO THE FBI (which is WHERE Biden's
getting his numbers from), which many commenters on social media used as a justification for claiming that if
the crime rate "fell," it must have been because POLICE DEPARTMENTS STOPPED REPORTING THEIR DATA.
According to Pew Research, 83% of law enforcement agencies sent data to the FBI in 2022.
(so HOW far off could the FBI's stats BE, if only 83% are reporting?)
Regardless, the fact that not all agencies report to the FBI means that the agency must extrapolate from the
data it does receive in order to create its estimates, and any kind of extrapolation creates additional
uncertainty in the numbers.
Finally, and most importantly for the claim at hand, the FBI's definition of "violent crime" is quite
limited, consisting of only murder and manslaughter, rape, robbery (theft with a weapon) and aggravated
assault (assault with a weapon).
Alternative data sources often add additional charges to their definitions of "violent crime," like simple
assault and intimidation. Differences in the way violent crime is defined make it harder to accurately
compare the FBI's data with data from other sources.