Violent crime in the US is down. Many voters refuse to believe it

Crime in the US has fallen dramatically since 1993. After a slight increase during the pandemic, violent crime is now on the decline again. In 2023, homicides fell by almost 12% compared to the previous year. However, the public refuses to believe this.

This mentality is not new. In 23 of 27 Gallup crime surveys conducted since the early 1990s, 60% or more of American adults reported that more crime at national level than the year before. Interestingly, local experiences with crime do not greatly influence this perception. In every Gallup crime survey conducted since the 1990s, Americans are less likely to say crime has increased in their area than the country as a whole.

This year is no exception. Many Americans are convinced that violent crime is increasing, even though it is decreasing.

What drives this misconception?

For more than a century, local news has focused heavily on violent crime because it captures and holds the public’s attention – and attention drives advertising revenue. Social media can nationalize a local news story in minutes.

In election years, politicians, their campaign staffs and supporters try to shape public perception of everything from the economy to violent crime. Some try to scare people into voting for them. During the 1988 presidential campaign, George HW Bush ran an ad against Democratic candidate Michael Dukakis, featuring a criminal named Willie Horton. It not only helped Bush 41 win; it ultimately reshaped America’s approach to criminal justice.

Disinformation, a topic I have been tackling in recent months, has taken both practices to a new level. Now a statement does not have to be factually anchored. When state and local officials angrily denied that Haitian immigrants in Springfield were eating people’s pets, J.D. Vance responded, “If I have to create stories so that the American media will actually pay attention to the suffering of the American people, then that’s what I do” I’m going to do it.”

Venezuelan gangs have done that don’t overflow Aurora, Colo. It’s a beautiful community. In reality, researchers have repeatedly discovered that immigrants do not commit higher crimes than native Americans. For example a 2020 study published in the highly regarded Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences used data from the Texas Department of Public Safety, which verifies and records the immigration status of all state detainees, to examine crime arrest rates among different groups. The researchers found that undocumented immigrants had done this significantly lower arrest rates compared to legal immigrants and native-born U.S. citizens.

More recent is one Study from 2024 conducted by a team from multiple universities analyzed 150 years of U.S. census data. The study found that during that time, immigrants were increasingly less likely to end up in prison than people born in the US. Beginning in 1960, the incarceration gap became so wide that immigrants today are 60% less likely to end up in prison than U.S.-borns.

Weaponizing data

Some claims are harder to verify than others, especially when large segments of the public are convinced to distrust reliable sources of information. Studies that distort published statistics to reach a different conclusion are extremely difficult to spot for non-experts. Here is such an example. Real Clear Investigations posted an analysis on October 16 titled: “Stealth Edit: FBI Quietly Reviews Violent Crime Statistics.” Within hours, Fox News amplified the story with a highly politicized headline: “FBI Quietly Updates Crime Data to Show Big Jump in Violence Under Biden-Harris Executive: ‘Shocking.’” From there, it went viral . A supporting post on Elon Musk’s X was viewed more than 50 million times.

Experts were quickly noticed different problems with Real Clear’s analysis. First, the FBI regularly updates data from previous years so that revisions are not unexpected or evidence of bias. Second, around the same time, the FBI revised its 2022 crime counts upward reduced the previous 2021 counts. This reinforced the shift in crimes from one year to the next.

However, expert criminologists are taking the 2021 data into account unreliable because the FBI changed its reporting system that year. Furthermore, only about 65% of the country was covered by participating law enforcement agencies that year. The remaining 35%, including major jurisdictions such as New York and Los Angeles, have not submitted data. These challenges and the stress of the pandemic created a lot of uncertainty in the 2021 counts.

Since 2021, our country has emerged from COVID-19 and data submission by law enforcement agencies has significantly improved. As a result, the reported counts for 2023 are not only more reliable, but also paint an encouraging picture.

Crime has fallen, especially homicide

Violent crime is down about 3% overall in 2023 compared to 2022 FBI. More remarkably, homicides fell by nearly 12%, making this the largest single-year decline in the past two decades. Jeff Asher, a well-known crime data analyst, recently noted that other data sources, including NORC’s Live Crime Tracker, the Real-Time Crime Index, the CDC and the Gun Violence Archive, point in the same direction.

Why is this important?

According to a Gallup poll released Oct. 9, three in four voters consider crime an “extreme” or “very important” problem. In a presidential election as close as this one, their choices should be based on fact, not fiction.