After suffering alarming spikes in violent crime, some cities are now reporting better news. But the past four years have been filled with debate over the national trends. Some say the government has been manipulating numbers. I spoke with a data expert about the how reporting of crime statistics has changed, and whether we’re getting the full truth.
“There has been a big change,” said John Lott, a crime data analyst and former senior advisor for research and statistics in the Justice Department, which is over the FBI.
Lott says the FBI crime statistics shouldn’t be taken alone at face value.
“Starting in 2021, they had a new system for reporting this data to the FBI from police departments around the country,” he said. “In 2020, 97% of police departments reported data. In 2022, 31% of police departments didn’t report any crime data to the FBI. Another 24% only partially reported data. So you had less than half of police departments in 2022 and 2021 reporting complete crime data to the FBI. That’s a huge sea change.”
Where there are gaps in data, Lott says the FBI does attempt to fill in the blanks.
“They try to guess,” he said. “The question is how good of a job they do in guessing. I don’t think they do a very good job in terms of guessing.”
He points to two distinct databases that he says should reflect similar trends, but have produced impossibly opposite results: the FBI statistics and the National Crime Victimization Survey, which tries to capture additional crimes that people don’t officially report.
“And the reason why we have this national crime victimization data is, we know most crimes aren’t reported to police,” he said. “About 40% of violent crimes are reported to police. About 30% of property crimes are reported to police. Before 2020, those numbers tended to go up and down together — the reported and the National Crime Victimization data. Since 2020, they’ve been going in completely opposite directions. So for example, in 2022, while the FBI showed a 2% drop in violent crime — reported violent crime — the National Crime Victimization data showed a 42% increase in violent crime. That’s the largest yearly increase we’ve ever seen in that measure. And that’s going back 50 years.”
Other factors that could make the crime rate seem lower than it is are short-staffed police departments with fewer officers to make arrests, and prosecutors not prosecuting some crimes.
“What’s happened is unreported crime has increased,” he said. “Because people say, ‘I’m only gonna report these crimes if I think the guy’s gonna get arrested.’”
Lott discovered the FBI quietly revised its 2022 figures from a 2.1% drop in violent crime to a 4.5% increase, making a total adjustment of 6.6%. That includes 80,000 violent crimes that had gone uncounted: 33,000 additional robberies, 37,000 extra aggravated assaults, 7,000 more rapes and 1,700 added murders.
Asked about politicization and possible manipulation of crime statistics, Lott said he thinks it’s gotten “a lot worse in the last few years, maybe over the last decade or so.”
“There’s numbers that come out of the Department of Justice now that I just don’t believe at all,” he said.
My team at “Full Measure” asked the FBI what accounted for the correction in their violent crime statistics for 2022. Did they undercount violent crime? And why are FBI trends opposite The National Crime Victimization Survey? They didn’t answer those questions, but said there will be increasing transparency.
Big cities like New York and Los Angeles resumed reporting their crime statistics to the FBI in 2023, when the FBI claims, again, that violent crime went down.
“Full Measure with Sharyl Attkisson” airs at 10 a.m. Sunday, WJLA (Channel 7) and WBFF (Channel 45).
