Many Americans say crime is increasing in their communities while FBI reports record drop

By Samantha Kamman, Christian Post Reporter Friday, January 12, 2024

Data released by the FBI purportedly shows a potentially historic decrease in crime. But recent surveys suggest many Americans believe crime is worsening despite national data that critics believe is "deceptive." 

The FBI released its third quarter of 2023 data last month, based on information received from 14,005 of 19,018 law enforcement agencies in the country. According to the data, violent crime dropped by 8%, while property crime fell by 6.3%, the lowest level since 1961.

Charles Stimson, deputy director of the conservative think tank Heritage Foundation's Edwin Meese III Center for Legal and Judicial Studies, told The Christian Post that the FBI data is "artfully deceptive." 

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"Crime, especially violent crime, is demographically and geographically concentrated in the inner cities. There's no such thing as a national crime rate, and if there is, it doesn't really mean that much," he said. 

Last Thursday, Rasmussen Reports published a poll that found 41% of American Adults say crime has increased in their community over the past year. Researchers polled 1,102 American adults from Dec. 26-28, 2023, with a margin of sampling error of +/- 3 percentage points with a 95% level of confidence. 

According to the findings, only 14% of American adults think that crime in their community has decreased, while 38% believe crime has stayed about the same over the past year. In a previous Rasmussen survey published two years ago, 45% of participants had said crime increased in their communities. 

Stimson said the survey shows that crime is "geographically, demographically concentrated in the inner cities."

He said while it's important to assess national trends when analyzing crime data and that the national aggregate data released by the FBI showed a slight decrease, the expert asserts that crime has increased in several cities. 

A Gallup poll of over 1,009 American adults released in December shows that 63% of Americans say the crime issue in the U.S. is either extremely or very serious, an increase from 54% in 2021. Meanwhile, 77% of respondents believe that the crime problem is worsening in the U.S. 

As CBS News reported on Dec. 29, in cities like Chicago, for example, while some crimes decreased during the COVID-19 pandemic, others, such as shootings and homicides, increased instead. After the pandemic subsided, certain crimes returned to pre-COVID-19 levels. 

According to a CBS Chicago analysis of police data from Jan. 1 through Dec. 11, 2023, there were nearly 27,700 violent crimes in the city in 2023, a figure that hasn't been reached since 2011. 

Stimson cited a November 2022 essay he wrote for The Heritage Foundation alongside policy experts Zach Smith and Kevin Dayaratna titled "The Blue City Murder Problem." The essay noted that of the 30 cities with the highest homicide rates, 27 have Democrat mayors. 

The authors argue that policies like refusing to prosecute entire categories of misdemeanor crimes or restrictions on asking for bail to ensure the presence of a defendant at another court meeting have led to an increase in crime.

Criminologist Jeffy Asher, who also analyzed the FBI numbers, found that murder in the U.S. declined at one of the fastest rates ever recorded in 2023. He noted gun violence still appeared to be heavy, even in places showing rapid decline. However, he asserted that the overall trend was "extraordinarily positive and should be recognized as such." 

Stimson contends that crime rates have been decreasing dramatically since 1992, following what he described as "massive crime tsunamis" that started in the 1960s and continued to build in the '70s before exploding in the '80s and peaking in 1992.

"But the next crime tsunami happened, starting in 2016, and it has been going up dramatically, especially in cities with the toxic trend of 'defund the police' and the election of rogue prosecutors," he said, citing Cook County State's Attorney Kim Foxx in Illinois as an example.