With the November election less than 7 months away, mainstream media outlets are now choosing to misrepresent the current state of crime in the United States, claiming that crime is declining without providing full context or key details.
As the Daily Caller reports, there are two ways in which the federal government measures crime in the United States: The Bureau of Justice Statistics’ (BJS) National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS) and the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s (FBI) Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR). Whereas the NCVS asks roughly 240,000 Americans whether or not they’ve been a victim of crime in the last year, the UCR focuses on crimes that have been reported to police within the last year and shared with the FBI.
While more people are reporting to the BJS that they have been the victims of crime, the FBI is reporting fewer crimes through the UCR. The UCR claims that violent crime dropped by 2% from 2021 to 2022, while the NCVS shows the exact opposite, reporting that the number of victims of violent crime increased by a staggering 42.4% from 2021 to 2022; this constitutes a rise from 16.5 victims per 1,000 people to 23.5 victims per 1,000.
Nevertheless, many mainstream media outlets such as CBS, NBC, PBS, NPR, Reuters, and The Hill have all turned to the FBI’s data to claim, falsely, that crime is on the decline. All such reports have failed to mention the crucial data from the NCVS.
Even Joe Biden himself has turned to deliberately misrepresenting the facts by relying solely on the FBI’s data.
“This week, the FBI released data showing that crime declined across nearly every category in 2023,” said Biden recently. “Thanks to the American Rescue Plan, which every Republican in Congress voted against, we made the largest-ever federal investment in fighting and preventing crime at any time in our history.”
This directly contradicts broad public sentiment in the United States, with a Gallup poll in December finding that 77% of Americans believe crime is getting worse.