Highlights
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The FBI and local police agencies offer data indicating substantial reductions in violent and property crime for 2024.
Yes, reductions in reported crimes for 2024 are good news and should be celebrated. However, to claim that we have turned the corner toward a safer society seems challenged based on the totality of the data.
So how do we go from “There’s lawlessness in this city, and these young kids are out of control,” to a 35 percent crime decrease in D.C. and Trump calling for a modified federal takeover?
This discussion isn’t just a D.C. issue; it’s happening nationwide.
Crime in America.Net–Chat GPT’s “Top 10 Sources for Crime in America” based on primary statistical sources with trusted secondary analysis.
Author
Quoted by The Associated Press, USA Today, A&E Television, the nationally syndicated Armstrong Williams Television Show (30 times), Department of Justice documents, US Supreme Court briefs, C-SPAN, the National Institute of Health, college and university online libraries, multiple books and journal articles, The Huffington Post, JAMA, The National Institute of Corrections, The Office of Juvenile Justice And Delinquency Prevention, The Bureau of Justice Assistance, Gartner Consulting, The Maryland Crime Victims Resource Center, The Marshall Project, The Heritage Foundation via Congressional testimony, Law Enforcement Today, Law Officer.Com, Blue Magazine, Corections.Com, Prison Legal News, The Hill (newspaper of Congress), the Journal of Offender Monitoring, Inside Edition Television, Yomiuri Shimbun (Asia’s largest newspaper), LeFigaro (France’s oldest newspaper), Oxygen and allied publications, Forbes, Newsweek, The Economist, The Toronto Sun, Homeland Security Digital Library, The ABA Journal, The Daily Express (UK) The Harvard Political Review, The Millennial Source, The Federalist Society, Lifewire, The Beccaria Portal On Crime (Europe), The European Journal of Criminology, American Focus and many additional publications.
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A comprehensive overview of crime for recent years is available at Violent and Property Crime Rates In The U.S.
Article
According to the latest report issued by the FBI for 2024, in August 2025, there were significant decreases in both property and violent crime, based on reports from state and local law enforcement agencies.
According to independent analysts, reductions in both violent and property crime are expected to continue in 2025.
Yet there are concerns and other data that modify our perceptions of crime that need to be considered.
Washington, D.C., And Trump
7News On Your Side returned Thursday to a Southeast D.C. community that has recently been plagued by gun violence to ask residents how they feel about the possibility of federal law enforcement officers patrolling the streets of the city as early as Friday morning.
Earlier this week, residents living near the intersection of R Street and 21st Place, Southeast, said they had endured several nights of gunfire. A shell casing and a car riddled with bullet holes were still there, in fact.
“There’s lawlessness in this city, and these young kids are out of control,” said Andrea Davis, the ANC commissioner for the neighborhood. A community member who asked to only be called Steve added: “I’ve been here at least 30 years, and we’ve never, never had this many shootings.”
Earlier this week, a Trump administration staffer was attacked during an attempted carjacking, putting D.C. in the national spotlight and in the crosshairs of the White House.
A White House official confirmed residents will see “an increased presence of federal law enforcement in response to crime in DC,” starting at midnight Friday, following a roll call at 11 p.m. Thursday.
This patrol will be a seven-day effort, but can be extended as needed. The official also said federal officers will be in marked units, and will focus on high traffic tourist areas “and other known hotspots.”
Crime Statistics in Washington, D.C.
The Numbeo Index (Editor’s note, European index) included 21 US cities in a list of the 100 most dangerous cities in the world, and D.C. was 72nd per the UK’s Daily Mail.
Washington, D.C. was ranked 2nd in the country for rates of homicides for cities with a population of 400,000-one million. D.C. was ranked 4th overall for homicides in 2024.
Washington, D.C., was rated 7th among the 30 cities with the highest rates of violence per FBI Data.
MSN marks Washington, D.C. as one of the most dangerous cities in the US (27th).
MSN states that D.C.has the 19th highest rate for homicides for 2025.
In the first ten months of 2023, nearly three juveniles a day were shot. The city’s homicide rate in 2024 was 27.3 deaths per 100,000 residents. By comparison, London’s homicide rate in 2023 was 1.3 per 100,000 residents; Switzerland’s homicide rate in 2021 was 0.48 per 100,000 residents. Anywhere else in the industrialized world, the D.C. crime situation would constitute a national emergency. It should in the United States, too.
About 65 percent of D.C. residents told The Washington Post that crime was a “very” or “extremely” serious problem last year, even as violence declined.
The local police union in Washington, D.C., wasted no time in welcoming President Donald Trump’s unprecedented federalization of the Metropolitan Police Department and the deployment of the National Guard to the district as part of a dubious crackdown on crime.
Is D.C. Cooking The Crime Books?
The Hill: Trump, who addressed reporters from the White House briefing room, cast doubt on those numbers. White House officials have cited reports of a D.C. police commander who was placed on leave over allegations he changed crime statistics.
Per News 4: The union claims police supervisors in the department manipulate crime data to make it appear violent crime has fallen considerably compared to last year. Union officials said there is a larger trend of manipulating crime statistics.
“When our members respond to the scene of a felony offense where there is a victim reporting that a felony occurred, inevitably there will be a lieutenant or a captain that will show up on that scene and direct those members to take a report for a lesser offense,” Fraternal Order of Police Chairman Gregg Pemberton said. “So, instead of taking a report for a shooting or a stabbing or a carjacking they will order that officer to take a report for a theft or an injured person to the hospital or a felony assault, which is not the same type of classification.
Per Jeff Asher: As you can see, it’s not unusual for MPDC’s publicly available data to suggest a larger drop in violent crime than is reported to the FBI (probably due to the former measuring incidents vs the latter measuring victims), but the percent changes are usually reasonably close. For 2024, however, the FBI’s data shows a 9 percent drop while MPDC’s public data shows a 35 percent drop.
Per the Washington Free Beacon: Records revealed in the suit from police sergeant Charlotte Djossou showed that department leadership directed subordinates to file theft and violent crimes as lower-level offenses.
DC police accused of changing crime stats just weeks before Trump federalized city.
Question
So how do we go from “There’s lawlessness in this city, and these young kids are out of control,” to a 35 percent crime decrease in D.C. and Trump calling for a modified federal takeover?
This discussion isn’t just a D.C. issue; it’s happening nationwide.
People Don’t Respond To Crime Numbers
People don’t respond to numbers. People react to their sense of personal safety. Citizens are often put off by politicians telling them that they are much safer when they believe that they can feel, touch, and see dangerous conditions in their communities or in their personal lives.
Record Increases In Violent Crime Versus Considerable Decreases In Crime-Who’s Right?
There are two reports from the US Department of Justice, giving vastly different crime counts: the National Crime Victimization Survey from the Bureau of Justice Statistics and crimes reported to law enforcement via the FBI.
The discussion below is from the National Crime Victimization Survey.
The great majority of crimes are not reported to the police; thus, the US Department of Justice, the criminological community, and journalists over 50 years ago insisted that there needed to be a more accurate method to gauge crime in America.
The National Crime Victimization Survey is based on questions to a representative sample of citizens of the US, much like Gallup or Pew, or any other reputable survey service.
It’s a count of “all” crime, not a count of “reported” crime via the FBI or independent analysts.
“The National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS) is the nation’s primary source of information on criminal victimization,” the US Census Bureau. It uses Census methodology. To my knowledge, no one disputes the US census and its data, yet most policy makers and journalists ignore the NCVS.
Candidate Trump used NCVS data to substantiate his claim that violent crime increased, which it did via a record increase for the last two official reporting periods.
Per the US Department of Justice, rates for violent crime rose approximately 44 percent (per analyst Jeff Asher and The Marshall Project) in 2022, and rates were essentially the same in 2023 per the National Crime Victimization Survey. Note: Chat GPT puts the increase at 42 percent.
It’s the largest increase in violent crime in our nation’s history, based on my decades of offering data on national crime statistics. The survey counts far more crimes than the FBI.
The National Crime Victimization Survey will offer updated national crime statistics for 2024 soon.
Reported Versus Unreported Crime
The vast majority of crime is not reported to law enforcement, per the Bureau of Justice Statistics of the US Department of Justice. So when the FBI or independent analysts, or the police, say that crime is up or down based on crimes reported to law enforcement, they are offering their conclusions per a small subset of crime.
Violent crime decreased an estimated 4.5 percent according to data from the FBI in 2024. Theoretically, based on a rather small decrease centered on 38 percent of violent victimizations reported in urban areas (where most crime occurs), a 4.5 percent decrease could easily be a 4.5 percent increase.
Reported Crimes In 2020–2023: About 38% of violent victimizations in urban areas were reported to police, which was lower than the percentages in suburban (43%) and rural (51%) areas. The reason for considering this data is that urban areas drive most reported crimes in a state.
Politics and Crime
Eight-in-ten U.S. adults say that when it comes to important issues facing the country, Republican and Democratic voters not only disagree on plans and policies, but also cannot agree on basic facts. Another 18% say voters in opposing parties can agree on basic facts, even if they disagree about policies, according to a Pew Research Center survey conducted in March.
The problem with the crime discussion of that 90 percent of what you read or hear, or watch, is based on advocacy. Nonpartisan sources are few. I once asked Chat GPT to give me the top sources for crime in America (based on interpretive crime sources), and many leaned left or were funded by left-leaning foundations, which is why I principally try to use federal crime data or statistics from Pew or Gallup.
As stated above, candidate Trump used data from the National Crime Victimization Survey to claim vast and record increases in rates of violent crime, which are accurate as of this writing, while noting that new NCVS statistics will be offered soon.
Ninety percent of media coverage refused to offer National Crime Victimization Survey data on rising violent crime, “the nation’s primary source of information on criminal victimization,” per the US Census Bureau. Why?
Authoritative Sources Are Claiming That Some Crimes Have Increased
But as in all things affecting any society, it’s a matter of perception and how you count the numbers. See section on property crimes.
Property crime numbers also tell a different story. Retail shrink (shoplifting-organized attacks) hit $94.5 billion in 2021, a 53% jump from 2019, according to the National Retail Federation’s annual survey, CNN. According to the National Retail Federation, $112.1 billion in losses were attributed to shrinkage, mostly theft and organized retail crime (ORC)—in 2022, a 19% increase over the year before.
There are 120 million porch package thefts in the US. The survey indicated that there are far more porch pirate thefts than total reported property crimes to the FBI. The financial toll of these thefts is $16 billion.
USA Today: Scammers and cybercriminals stole a record total of $16.6 billion from Americans in 2024, marking a 33% increase in losses from 2023, the FBI said in a new report on April 23.
The Hill (the newspaper of Congress) addressed cargo theft. The average value of each cargo theft is more than $200,000, and according to the National Insurance Crime Bureau, there has been a 1,500 percent increase in cargo theft incidents since 2021. Total cargo theft losses increased by 27 percent in 2024 and are projected to rise another 22 percent in 2025.
A growing number of firearms are being stolen from parked cars, especially in urban areas, according to a new report that highlights a frequently overlooked source of illegally circulating guns. The Council on Criminal Justice released an analysis examining five years of gun theft data reported to law enforcement in 16 cities — both urban and rural — with populations over 250,000. The number of guns reported stolen from vehicles increased by 31% over a five-year period. In large urban areas, the overall gun theft rate jumped by 42% between 2018 and 2022.
Approximately 80 percent of what we call crime are property events. Larcenies, burglaries, and vehicle thefts may be down based on 30 percent of property crimes reported to law enforcement. Still, it’s more than possible for total property crimes to be up based on the criteria above, not counted by the FBI in their National Incident-Based Reporting System.
Fear Of Crime Is At Record Levels
I’ve read articles about Gallup’s finding that fear of crime is at record highs and, according to several national media sources, Americans are being delusional (clueless?) because crime is declining. Per Gallup, 40 percent are afraid to walk alone at night near home, the highest in three decades, 34 percent avoided driving into certain areas of their town or city, 31 percent refrained from visiting central areas of nearby cities, and 31 percent avoided walking, jogging, or running alone in their area. Additional surveys support the notion that people are fearful.
A Matter Of Perception? Some American Cities And States Are Still Noted For Violence
I read an array of publications about crime, both domestic and foreign. I found an index comparing London to other world cities as to crime. The index included 21 US cities in a list of the 100 most dangerous cities in the world using the Numbeo Index via an article in the UK’s Daily Mail.
There is an array of American cities known for being among the most dangerous.
Per a new data from the Bureau of Justice Statistics based on the National Crime Victimization Survey, the report presents selected state-level estimates of violent and property victimization for the 3-year aggregate periods of 2017–19 and 2020–22 in the 22 largest U.S. states: Arizona, California, Colorado, Florida, Georgia, Illinois, Indiana, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, New Jersey, New York, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, Texas, Virginia, Washington, and Wisconsin.
There are dramatic differences in the rates of violent and property crimes per state; thus, one can celebrate national crime reductions based on crimes reported to the police while recognizing that there are huge variations in rates of crime depending on where you live.
A Return To Previous Crime Patterns?
We have just exited years of considerable growth in crime in cities after COVID, with a 50 percent increase in homicides and a 36 percent increase in aggravated assaults per the Major Cities Chiefs Association (2019-2022). If there are decreases in reported crime, it could be nothing more than a statistical readjustment referred to by researchers as a regression to the mean. Crime rises and falls for reasons we find hard (impossible?) to explain.
Voters Were Right About the Economy. The Data Was Wrong. Is It Similar To Perceptions Of Crime?
Federal statistics are routinely corrected and can be wrong. Multiple media articles suggested that voters are worrying about nothing when it comes to crime.
Politico: Before the presidential election, many Democrats were puzzled by the seeming disconnect between ‘economic reality’ as reflected in various government statistics and the public’s perceptions of the economy on the ground.
Many in Washington bristled at the public’s failure to register how strong the economy really was. They charged that right-wing echo chambers were conning voters into believing entirely preposterous narratives about America’s decline.
What they rarely considered was whether something else might be responsible for the disconnect — whether, for instance, government statistics were fundamentally flawed (emphasis added). What if the numbers supporting the case for broad-based prosperity were themselves misrepresentations? What if, in fact, darker assessments of the economy were more authentically tethered to reality?
What we uncovered shocked us. The bottom line is that, for 20 years or more, including the months prior to the election, voter perception was more reflective of reality (emphasis added) than the incumbent statistics. Our research revealed that the data collected by the various agencies is largely accurate. Moreover, the people staffing those agencies are talented and well-intentioned.
But the filters used to compute the headline statistics are flawed. As a result, they paint a much rosier picture of reality than bears out on the ground” (emphasis added).
The proactive policing study (a literature review) was offered by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine in 2017. It was financed by the US Department of Justice, National Institute of Justice. The criminal rehabilitation study (another literature review) was offered by Vanderbilt University in 2019 and, again, it was funded by the US Department of Justice, National Institute of Justice (NIJ). NIJ-funded research carries robust quality controls.
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