As he was running for reelection in 2020, Donald Trump warned voters that electing Joe Biden would lead to rampant crime and violence on American streets. His pitch was a bit odd, given that the ads centered on scenes of looting and arson that had occurred that summer — that is, under Trump. The then-president’s argument was that this unrest was a function of the Democratic leadership in those cities or states or wherever it landed so that it wasn’t any Republican’s fault.
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That year, upended by the coronavirus pandemic and a new round of protests focused on racial justice, was marked by a surge in violent crime that continued into the first years of Biden’s presidency. But then the surge began to subside, something that has been clear for some time now.
New data released by the FBI on Monday measures big drops in crime across the United States. Violent crime was down nationally in the first quarter of 2024 by more than 15 percent relative to the prior year. Property crime was down 15 percent as well, and murder fell by more than 26 percent. The drop in the number of murders reported by the FBI was largest in the country’s largest cities, but these drops were uniform regardless of the size of the reporting municipality.
This is a critically important qualifier: The FBI is presenting data it has received from law enforcement agencies around the country. That introduces two potential inaccuracies to the totals. First, that not every law enforcement agency would report its data on time, which they don’t. Second, that the national numbers are dependent on the accuracy of those individual reports, which demonstrably vary.
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Jeff Asher, a crime analyst and consultant, did a spot-check of a number of cities included in the FBI’s report.
“I found places where violent crime was basically spot on compared to publicly available data (like Phoenix, Philadelphia, Houston, Seattle, San Antonio, and Denver),” he wrote on Monday, “places (like Washington, DC, San Diego and Long Beach) where the FBI’s data is understating declines, and places (like Baltimore, Dallas, and New York City) where things are clearly quite wrong in the FBI data (violent crime in Baltimore and Dallas is down but nowhere near as much as suggested by the FBI’s data, and NYPD data showed a small uptick in violent crime in Q1 2024).”
You can see the first-quarter data for the New York Police Department online. As Asher notes, the FBI’s assessment of crime in the city during the first quarter — 46 murders, 2,284 robberies and 2,711 burglaries — is too low. The NYPD’s public data has those figures at 82, 3,937 and 3,129, respectively. The number of murders and burglaries is still down from 2023, but less substantially than in the FBI data.
Asher’s firm has its own dashboard compiling crime statistics across the country. What it shows is that murder is down in major cities in the United States, albeit not quite as dramatically as the FBI data would suggest. (The dashboard’s numbers show a 19 percent drop compared to the FBI’s 24 percent.) In a number of places, murders ticked up slightly, according to the dashboard, but that’s offset by big declines in a lot of major cities, such as Chicago, New Orleans and Philadelphia (where the drop was the largest).
The perennial problem with national crime data is that it is incomplete and out of date. That means that our assessment of trends in crime is necessarily backward-looking — and that those looking to exploit crime for political purposes have an opportunity. You can always point to incidents of crime to suggest that crime is rampant or expanding, confident that your arguments will only be debunked months or years later.
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We are talking here about Fox News.
Since this point in June 2023, Fox News has mentioned “crime” at least 20,000 times — almost as much as CNN and MSNBC have mentioned it combined. (In 2022, Fox News focused heavily on a purported rise in crime as the midterm elections approached, then moving on to other subjects once voting was over.) In every single month of the past year, Fox News has talked about crime more than CNN or MSNBC.
Fox has backed away from talking about “migrant crime,” a term of art it began promoting in February and that quickly became a staple of Donald Trump’s campaign rhetoric. The channel’s focus on New York City as an epicenter of this purported surge in crime committed by immigrants was hard to sustain given the city’s declining crime rates. (Fox News viewers are nonetheless far more likely to falsely believe that immigrants commit crime at higher rates than native-born U.S. residents.)
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It is good news that violent crime appears to be down substantially. There is no reason to think that, since the first quarter of the year, it has suddenly shot back up. But another election is approaching, meaning that the fog of uncertainty about crime numbers may once again give rise to political attacks or warnings about what crime might do depending on how Americans vote.
There’s an opportunity here for the Biden campaign, though. It could simply rerun Trump’s 2020 ad showing unrest that unfolded that year, noting who was president at the time.
