The reliability of the FBI’s Report of Violent Crime

 From John Lott's Crime Prevention Research Center.

Here is the link.

Here are some excerpts.

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The U.S. employs two distinct measures of crime. The Federal Bureau of Investigation’s Uniform Crime Reporting program counts the number of crimes reported to police annually. The Bureau of Justice Statistics, in its National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS), asks 240,000 people a year whether they have been victims of a crime. The two measures have diverged since 2020: The FBI has reported less crime, while more people say they have been victims. For example, between 2021 and 2022, the FBI UCR showed reported violent crime fell by 2.1%, but the NCVS showed reported violent crime increased by 29.3%.

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As previously noted, the news media relies exclusively on FBI-reported violent crime data. We previously discussed how the FBI-reported crime rates are unrelated to the NCVS. The evidence shown here indicates real problems with the FBI-reported violent crime measure and that the FBI data are extremely misleading after 2020.

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The divergence is due to several reasons. In 2021, 37% of police departments nationwide, including Los Angeles and New York, stopped reporting crime data to the FBI. The more important point here is how this has changed over time. As the Washington Examiner notes: “In 2019, 89% of agencies covering 97% of the population submitted data, but by 2021, that coverage plummeted to less than 63% of departments overseeing just 65% of the population.“

In addition, in cities from Baltimore to Nashville, the FBI is undercounting crimes those jurisdictions reported.

And the figures the agencies do report to the FBI do not match the agencies’ publicly reported figures. For Baltimore, the FBI reported 225 murders in 2023, but the city reported 262 — which means the FBI left out 37 murders. In Milwaukee, the police department reported a 7% increase in robberies, but the FBI showed a 13% drop. Nashville’s own data tallied more than 6,900 aggravated assaults in 2023, but the FBI counted only 5,941, leaving almost 1,000 of those offenses “missing.” This trend is consistent across the board: While 2022’s FBI city-level figures track the police’s own data, the 2023 numbers consistently undercount offense totals. Any year-to-year comparison overstates decline.Mark Morgan and Sean Kennedy, “Bad data from the FBI mislead about crime,” Washington Examiner, April 5, 2024.