Highlights
This article is available as a podcast on YouTube.
This article was created to support my appearance on an episode of Heroes Behind The Badge.
The majority of Americans approve of Trump’s approach on crime: AP-NORC poll, Axios.
Throughout my college studies, particularly in Constitutional law and history, I was taught that the perceptions and rights of individual citizens were of paramount importance and should not be overlooked. We had a duty to protect both.
If true, then we are obligated to be concerned with the safety and equal treatment of all Americans. Is the President doing that through his use of National Guard troops?
We are in a cultural war over the deployment of troops and perceptions of crime. In any war, both sides exaggerate.
CrimeinAmerica.Net-Chat GPT’s “Top 10 Sources for Crime in America” based on primary statistical sources with trusted secondary analysis.
Author
Crime in America.Net-“Trusted Crime Data, Made Clear.”
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.
Sign up for notice of new articles on the front page of this site.
A comprehensive overview of crime for recent years is available at Violent and Property Crime Rates In The U.S.
Note
Most citations that appear in this article are available in Violent and Property Crime In The US.
Note
This article was created to support my appearance on an episode of Heroes Behind The Badge.
Opinion
When I left law enforcement and entered college, I was taught that crime affects everything. It impacts jobs, economies, school test scores, tourism, childhood confidence, the family structure, and urban liveability. Crime has a way of touching every aspect of life. Suppressing crime was seen as a human rights issue.
We are now engaged in a national discussion on crime, sparked by the President’s intervention of federal agents and the National Guard in Washington, D.C., and potentially other cities. The President’s D.C. intervention is so dramatically different from past crime strategies that only time and the federal courts will tell us if it’s a viable strategy.
Daily, I read media articles insisting that crime is declining substantially, with the not-so-subtle reference that Americans are imbecilic if they don’t believe that. They don’t use that word, but I believe that’s what they mean. How can you possibly be so stupid that you don’t recognize that your life is improving?
Well-funded foundations are pouring a substantial amount of money into convincing you that things are dramatically improving regarding crime. Seminars and podcasts encourage the notion that crime is down significantly. One source wants the media to tone down their photos when covering police and justice issues.
Why? Progressive foundations control the narrative about crime analysis; probably the majority of what you read or hear about crime rates or totals comes from organizations they fund. Reporters and criminologists use these sources without stating that there is an obvious self-proclaimed bias; they are routinely described as non-partisan when they are not.
Money is being spent trying to create a narrative that crime is plummeting, and you have little to be concerned about. There’s nothing wrong with trying to control the message as long as everyone is transparent about their sources and biases. Political actors have a responsibility to be transparent about their intentions, motivations, and sources of funding, enabling citizens to assess the credibility and integrity of their messages.
Two Primary Lenses
I have come to believe that people see the crime issue through two primary lenses: those who believe that criminals should be held accountable for their actions, and those who see the justice system as oppressive and desperately in need of change.
Who’s right? Suppose you see crime as an insidious dilemma that impacts every aspect of your life and the lives of everyone in your community. In that case, you will view the world differently from those who see crime as a series of tragic events that require compassion and empathy.
If you look at a recent CBS News story, the President’s actions are either widely supported or dismissed, depending on your political affiliation. We are in a cultural war over the deployment of troops and perceptions of crime. In any war, both sides exaggerate.
In many cities, people complain that wait times for a police officer to respond to a reported crime can take over an hour, if an officer appears at all. In Detroit, many claim that police response to property crimes is nonexistent. So, regardless of your beliefs about crime, cops not appearing would scare anyone; it becomes a de facto statement about how you feel about crime.
Is Violent Crime Going Down?
Yes, crimes REPORTED to law enforcement are declining. It’s good news.
Does it mean that you now live in safety? My heavens, no.
The latest data from the FBI, based on crimes reported to the police, tells us that violent crime decreased an estimated 4.5 percent in 2024. The FBI’s crime statistics estimates, based on reported data for 2023, show that national violent crime decreased an estimated 3.0 percent in 2023 compared to 2022.
Decreases of 4.5 and 3.0 percent are welcomed, but it’s not much to celebrate, especially when you consider that homicides increased by 50 percent and aggravated assaults increased by 36 percent from 2019 to 2022, per the Major Cities Chiefs Association. Crime reductions were inevitable after rising so dramatically, what criminologists call a regression to the mean or average.
People are celebrating the decline in crime. There are categories of crime with much bigger decreases, like homicides and shootings, but nevertheless, overall violence has decreased by small numbers.
Per the FBI, crime continues falling in 2025, but I guarantee that early results will be smaller based on preliminary results in the past when compared to final yearly numbers. For example, there are police agencies that do a data dump at the end of the year that skews earlier results. Sometimes, earlier FBI preliminary data on crime is cut in half.
In the final analysis, if you believe that local or national crime reductions are significant, you might believe that the President’s interventions in D.C. and elsewhere are dubious constitutional exercises conducted solely for political reasons.
If you believe that cities remain unsafe regardless of crime reductions and fear of crime is at near record highs, you may welcome the President’s interventions.
It all depends on how you see crime. It all depends on your perceptions of family safety.
Let’s Take A Look At Crime In Urban Areas-Unreported Crime
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, per the Bureau of Justice Statistics of the USDOJ.
The percentage of rape and sexual assault victimizations in rural areas that were reported to police (52%) was almost four times higher than the share reported to police in urban areas (13%), and almost two times higher than the share reported in suburban areas (29%).
Reporting to police for simple assault victimizations was higher in suburban (39%) and rural areas (46%) than in urban areas (32%). Simple assaults likely comprised roughly 55–60 percent of total violent victimizations per ChatGPT.
For robbery, the percentage of victimizations reported to police was lower in suburban areas (49%) than urban areas (63%). The percentage of robbery victimizations reported to police was not statistically different between urban and rural areas.
So what does this mean? If 38 percent of all urban violent crimes are reported to the police, it means that the overwhelming number of violent crimes are unknown.
Only 13 percent of rapes and sexual assaults are reported in urban areas? That means that rapists are getting away with the ultimate abuse of wives, girlfriends, and daughters. If 32 percent of simple assaults (the most numerous violent crime) are reported, that means that criminals roam with impunity.
So if the issue is crime in cities, we don’t have that much to celebrate. The overwhelming majority of urban crimes are not reported. Small reductions in violent crime theoretically could be increases, not decreases.
There are millions of dollars being thrown into podcasts, seminars, and websites telling you that crime is down dramatically. Why is it so important to convince you that crime is down while ignoring other factors, such as crime reporting and the counts of record violence through the National Crime Victimization Survey?
The National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS): The Nation’s Primary Source Of Crime Statistics
The NCVS offers data for the last two official reporting periods, recording the largest increase in rates of violence in the nation’s history.
The National Crime Victimization Survey from the Bureau of Justice Statistics of the USDOJ does what the name implies: it conducts a national survey of citizens age 12 and above. The NCVS is described by the US Census Bureau as the nation’s primary source of crime statistics.
The National Crime Victimization Survey in a 2023 report for the calendar year 2022 offered the largest increase in violent crime in the nation’s history (44 percent), according to analyst Jeff Asher, and The Marshall Project.
Per the press release (September 12, 2024) from the US Department of Justice for the new 2023 report, “Data from the National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS) indicate that in 2023, the rate of nonfatal violent victimization in the United States was 22.5 victimizations per 1,000 persons age 12 or older, which was similar to the 2022 rate of 23.5 violent victimizations per 1,000 persons age 12 or older.” Per the September 12, 2024, USDOJ press release headline, “Violent victimization unchanged year over year…”
The NCVS for the calendar year 2024 will be released soon. Only the folks at the USDOJ know what’s coming.
Fear Of Crime
With President Trump’s efforts to reduce crime in Washington, D.C., there are multiple articles in major publications warning Democrats not to fall into a trap where they seem insensitive to the plight of crime victims and those concerned about crime, which is most Americans.
Per Gallup, we are near record increases in fear of crime nationally. 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. Per Axios, “As armed National Guard troops patrol the nation’s capital, a majority of Americans now see handling crime as a relative strength for President Trump, according to a new AP-NORC poll.
“McWilliams’ views reflect the thinking of a lot of Democrats, according to a recent poll from The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research. It finds that while most disapprove of how Trump is handling the issue, a large majority, 68%, see crime as a “major problem” in large cities.”
I have been to cities with crime problems courtesy of the federal government. Most have been in areas with minority populations. I have never been in a city where the residents said that they do not want crime controlled. I have never been in a city where the residents didn’t express fear.
The Most Dangerous Cities
So the President claims that many cities are havens for crime. The terms he uses are extreme. Is he correct?
At least 18 people have been shot, six fatally, in shootings across Chicago this weekend, police said. This weekend’s gun violence comes after at least 58 people were shot, eight fatally, across the city over the long Labor Day holiday weekend last week. Yet many are insisting that crime in Chicago is dropping considerably. Chicago is seeing the fewest summer murders since 1965.
So who’s right? Is Chicago a hell-hole of crime or an example of declining crime?
In my opinion, everyone exaggerates crime data. In my opinion, I’m not aware of a politician or their advisors who don’t, and this comes from directly supporting presidential and gubernatorial political campaigns. For a presidential campaign, I had to consistently object to staff misuse of crime numbers. I was not the most popular person in the room. Senior staff, however, were supportive.
Are Chicago and Baltimore really the most dangerous cities in America? To get to that point with clarity, you would need to extend the National Crime Victimization Survey and geo-locate its data to individual cities. The Bureau of Justice Statistics is experimenting with geo-locating, see state data.
If 38 percent of violent crimes are reported for urban areas, obviously, we are missing a ton of individual crimes, so whatever is in commercial or media sites as to “the most dangerous city” using reported crime is a dramatic undercount. However, if you want to see that data, it’s available here. It’s principally based on FBI numbers; again, sources mostly use reported crimes, not all crimes.
At the bottom of the article cited above, it also includes earlier geo-located National Crime Victimization Survey data.
“Most Dangerous Places in the U.S.” is one example of recent crime data from US News and World Report. It’s based on reported crime rates.
Just note that every index will use different criteria, so the next report you read will provide you with a variety of findings, which is why I tend to stay away from extended discussions about which city is the most dangerous. If you add rates instead of numbers, size, income, economic data, surveys, or focus solely on homicides, you will get a divergent answer every time. If you stick to cities above 500,000, you will get different findings. Yes, there are cities that seem to populate most surveys.
Smaller cities are included in the US News and World Report cited above, and I’ll suggest that there is a world of difference between compact cities in Louisiana compared to Baltimore, Memphis, Detroit, and St. Louis, and others that seem to frequently be in the headlines.
An international index rates 21 American cities among the world’s most dangerous, including Baltimore, Washington, D.C., and Chicago.
Those of us studying crime for decades understand that you can make any claim you want. But it’s important that readers understand that reported crime drops are happening in most American cities and reduced numbers of crime are likely to be a national regression to the mean or average, not what cities are doing. Increases and decreases in crime are common occurrences regardless of interventions.
By the way, decreases in reported crime are happening in other Western Industrialized countries, so the US experience is not unique (forthcoming article).
Conclusions
So what do we make of all this? On the national, left-leaning television show “Morning Joe” (MSNBC), he asked the mayor of Chicago about crime. “There was no more perfect encapsulation of the Democratic Party’s crime problem than Joe Scarborough’s bruising interview with Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson.” When you have MSNBC asking what’s so wrong about sending in troops and federal agents into Chicago, then progressives have a perception problem.
Is reported crime down? Yes. Nationally, overall violent crime has decreased by small numbers. Is crime from the National Crime Victimization Survey up? Yes, by record amounts. The new survey will be out soon. Is fear of crime at near record highs? Yes.
I do not want to make this solely about President Trump and his detractors, but those with a significant concern about crime (most Americans) probably want something done to make their lives safer, regardless of statistics.
Progressives have a way of damaging their own agenda. They are being warned by Democratic think tanks to change their messaging. They are warned not to appear insensitive to public perceptions of crime.
Those who believe that Trump is dictatorial and unconstitutional insist that crime is plummeting and that you have no right to be fearful. Your concern about crime makes you a silly goose.
Throughout my college studies, particularly in Constitutional law and history, I was taught that the perceptions and rights of individual citizens were of paramount importance and should not be overlooked. We had a duty to protect both.
If true, then we are obligated to be concerned with the safety and equal treatment of all American citizens. Is the President doing that? Only time and the federal courts can make that decision. But for the moment, his D.C. results seem encouraging.