OPINIONS: Crime keeps falling. When will voters believe it?

The Major Cities Chiefs Association reported recently that, in the 69 large US cities and counties from which it received data, violent crime was down 6.1% in the first half of 2024 compared with the same period a year earlier, and homicides were down 17.4%. A Council on Criminal Justice analysis of data from 39 cities that have been consistently reporting monthly crime statistics for the past six years found that homicides, robberies and aggravated assaults were all down in the first half of this year relative not just to last year but to the first half of 2019. In the 277 cities from which AH Datalytics collects high-frequency data, murders were down 17.6% as of mid-August relative to the same period last year - a decline that if it (1) holds up for the full year and (2) turns out to be representative of murders nationwide would mean the national murder rate would have retraced all of its rise in 2020 and 2021 and then some.

Next month, we’ll likely get similar or perhaps even better news from the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s quarterly crime report - recent editions of which have shown steeper crime declines than the Major Cities reports - and the new Real-Time Crime Index to be unveiled by AH Datalytics with data from hundreds of local police departments. Also due out this fall are the FBI’s final 2023 crime statistics from more than 15,000 police and sheriff’s departments nationwide. The 2022 edition showed violent crime down 1.7% and property crime up 7.1% from the previous year, while preliminary 2023 data showed both declining, 5.7% and 4.3% respectively.

This is, first of all, great to see. The frightening crime increase that began in 2020 is looking more and more like a passing phenomenon and not a continuing national disaster like the crime wave of the late 1960s through early 1990s. It also raises an interesting question as one of the two major party candidates for president keeps trying to make crime a top campaign issue. Will the big improvement apparent in the crime data change any voters’ minds?

One answer is sure, eventually, but probably not as many as it should. Public perceptions of crime do shift with crime rates, but there’s usually a lag when crime drops, and even during the great crime decline of the 1990s and 2000s, the share of Americans who thought crime was rising nationally never fell below 41%.

Another answer is that, like everything else these days, views about crime are increasingly determined by partisan leaning. In the most recent Gallup crime survey, conducted last October, 92% of Republicans said crime was up while only 58% of Democrats did. That’s a big change from the 1990s, when perceptions of crime differed only slightly across partisan lines.

Still, it’s not all partisanship. Democrats and Republicans alike correctly perceived that there was an increase in crime in 2020, while a majority of Democrats have continued to think crime is rising since then even as it falls.

One explanation for the persistent belief that crime is worsening has to be media coverage. “If it bleeds, it leads” has long been a guiding principle of local television news, and in recent years Fox News Channel has adopted a similar approach for its national audience, with a particular focus on crime in its home base of New York City.

The choice of New York is of some consequence, given that the nation’s largest city has not been following the encouraging national trajectory on crime. Sure, its homicide rate was the fifth lowest among the nation’s 50 largest cities in 2023 and is down 10.6% so far this year. But incidence of other violent crime in New York is not especially low compared with other big cities, is on the increase so far in 2024, and if current trends persist will end the year 35% higher than in 2019. Violent crime is also up since 2019 in the second- and third-largest US cities, Los Angeles and Chicago, and isn’t really declining this year (in the Major Cities data, it’s down 0.9% in Los Angeles and up 2.5% in Chicago). These three cities account for less than 5% of US population, but they loom large in the national imagination.

Not every kind of crime is on the decline nationally, either. Shoplifting rates have risen this year in the cities tracked by the Council on Criminal Justice, and while incidence of auto theft has fallen since last year, it’s still a lot higher than before the pandemic. These are far more common crimes than murder, meaning that for many Americans the sharp fall in homicides is an abstraction while the toothpaste locked up behind glass in the local drugstore is very real.

A big advantage of the homicide numbers, though, is that we can be pretty sure they are reliable - murders tend not to go unreported, plus the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s National Center for Health Statistics tracks them independently from the police as part of its mortality statistics. Statistics on other crimes are affected by how likely people are to report them to police and how diligent the police are about keeping track, giving skeptics some reason to distrust them.

Starting in 2021, there was the added complication that many police departments struggled with a new national crime reporting system adopted by the FBI. That year, only 60% of US law enforcement agencies contributed to the FBI’s Uniform Crime Report, down from 76% the year before. This reporting decline has become a favorite talking point of Republicans trying to discredit data showing crime declines, but it’s a flawed one. For one thing, the FBI doesn’t just add up all the crimes reported to it each year and compare that to the previous year’s number; it attempts to adjust for gaps in the data. For another, the reporting percentage was back up to 71% in 2022 and will surely be even higher for 2023 and 2024. If crime has been underreported, it was most pronounced in 2021. Now there’s less reason to think the FBI is way off.

Another crime report due out next month, the results of the 2023 National Crime Victimization Survey conducted on behalf of the Bureau of Justice Statistics, will offer another reality check on the good news from police crime reports. Over the decades, the survey’s findings have mostly paralleled the FBI’s crime numbers, but the 2022 edition found a marked increase in violent crime victimization over 2020 and 2021 even as reported violent crime fell. I’m betting it will have fallen back again in 2023. If it doesn’t, like many Americans, I’ll get a little more skeptical of the crime decline.

Justin Fox is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering business, economics and other topics involving charts. A former editorial director of the Harvard Business Review, he is author of “The Myth of the Rational Market.” This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.

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