Crime levels in the US may be “significantly higher” than FBI data published in its most recent statistics because of “reporting problems” and the agency’s switch about four years ago to a National Incident-Based Reporting System (NIBRS).
The traditional FBI Uniform Crime Report system was replaced in 2020-21 with NIBRS and the Crime Data Explorer. It is a user-unfriendly platform, according to some critics, which apparently does not get the same level of reporting from local and state police agencies.
Now, an independent group consisting of law enforcement officials and analysts calling themselves the Coalition for Law, Order and Safety (CLOS) has issued its own report, suggesting that the FBI data is incomplete, and doesn’t square with other sources such as the CDC. The CLOS group offers an example of the problem: “In 2022, the FBI reported 21,156 “murders and non-negligent homicides” compared to the CDC reporting 24,867 “homicides” – a difference of 3,711 violent deaths, a reporting gap that has widened since the FBI switched to a new system (NIBRS).”
The CLOS Report is titled “Assessing America’s Crime Crisis: Trends, Causes, and Consequences.” The 35-page report outlines a handful of problems in the U.S.
- FACT #1: America faces a public safety crisis beset by high crime and an increasingly dysfunctional justice system.
- FACT #2: Crime has risen dramatically over the past few years and may be worse than some official statistics claim.
- FACT #3: Although preliminary 2023 data shows a decline in many offenses, violent and serious crime remains at highly elevated levels compared to 2019.
- FACT #4: Less than 42% of violent crime victims and 33% of property crime victims reported the crime to law enforcement.
- FACT #5: The American people feel less safe than they did prior to 2020.
The report lists four “major interrelated factors” which CLOS asserts “have contributed to America’s growing public safety crisis and the public’s declining confidence in the justice system.”
- CAUSE #1: De-policing – the systemic ‘pull-back’ by law enforcement due to policy changes, political hostility, staffing shortages, and plummeting morale
- CAUSE #2: Decarceration – the reduction in incarceration of offenders through policy changes, prosecutorial preferences, and the pandemic
- CAUSE #3: De-prosecution – the decision by prosecutors to limit the number and type of charges, adjudication, and sentences of criminal defendants for ideological purposes;
- CAUSE #4: Politicization – the use of the criminal justice system to pursue political ends by prioritizing prosecutions of individuals or groups that are adversarial to the prosecutors’ views or goals.
According to the CLOS report, “American communities are less safe than they were a decade ago. That fact is undeniable. Similarly, the evidence is clear that over the last decade, serious – especially violent – crime rose in 2015 and 2016, then briefly fell before rising again since 2020. Early indications suggest that the steep rise in homicides in 2020-2021 has slowed, if not reversed, but not returned to levels recorded five or ten years ago.
“In other words,” the report continues, “to say crime is down is like descending from a tall peak and standing on a high bluff, saying you are closer to the ground – a true but misleading statement. The truth is that violent crime is substantially elevated in major cities (and nationally) compared to pre-2020 levels.
For other crimes, the data is often inconsistent, unreliable, or unavailable making trends difficult – but not
impossible – to discern. The evidence we do have suggests some serious offenses (i.e., carjacking and auto theft) have continued to rise dramatically. Other aggregate data suggests some offenses have continued their decades-long decline.”
Fox News is reporting that officials with the New Orleans Police Department acknowledged under-reporting sex crime data filed with the FBI for 2021 and 2022. The story also referred to a Los Angeles Times investigation almost ten years ago that revealed the Los Angeles Police Department had “misclassified nearly 1,200 violent crimes during a one-year span ending in September 2013, including hundreds of stabbings, beatings and robberies.”
The CLOS report seems to sum up the problem of under-reporting thusly:
“Over the past two decades, the largest categories of violent crime (robbery and aggravated assault) accounted for an annual average 25% and 65% of total violent crime respectively, with rape and murder representing only 10%. The same effect is visible in property crime as auto theft has risen dramatically over the past decade (+34%) while larceny has dropped (-22%), yet the total combined number of reported property crime offenses across those two categories fell in raw numbers, percentage change, and rate per 100,000 population. Thus, overall crime indexes and even violent or property crime indexes can mislead about trends more than illuminate.
“Complicating data analysis further, the data collected by local law enforcement agencies prior to 2021 was done under the UCR Summary Reporting System (SRS). Over decades, the FBI implemented a new more detailed crime data collection system called National Incident Based- Reporting System (NIBRS) which fully replaced SRS in 2021. NIBRS data is much more granular and collects significantly more offense type and circumstance data but is more onerous to collect and has proven difficult to comply with for departments who use outdated systems, are undermanned, or suffer from overstretched budgets. When NIBRS fully replaced SRS, agency participation plummeted from 85% of agencies covering 95% (314 million of the resident population) in 2020 to 63% of agencies covering 65% of the US population in 2021.”
