The news media relies almost exclusively on FBI data to report on changes in crime rates. But there is strong evidence that FBI data are less reliable than in the past.
The U.S. uses two different measures of crime. The FBI Uniform Crime Reporting program counts the number of crimes reported to police annually. The Bureau of Justice Statistics, by contrast, uses its annual National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS) to ask 240,000 people a year whether they have been victims of a crime. The NCVS is used to estimate total crime (reported and unreported). The survey indicates that only 42% of violent crimes and 32% of property crimes were reported in 2022.
I have pointed out before that since 2020, the FBI’s number of reported crimes and the NCVS’s number of total crimes have gone in opposite directions. For example, between 2021 and 2022, the FBI showed a 2.1% drop in violent crime, but the NCVS showed an increase of 29.3%.
But there is a more fundamental problem. The FBI and NCVS’s estimates of reported crimes have also gone in opposite directions since 2020. From 2008 to 2019, the FBI and NCVS measures of reported violent crimes generally tended to move up and down together. But from 2020 to 2022, these two numbers were almost perfectly negatively related to each other. Each time one measure of reported violent crimes rose, the other measure fell.
By John R. Lott, Jr.