RUTHFULLY YOURS

In the debate Tuesday:

FORMER PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: Crime here is up and through the roof. Despite their fraudulent statements that they made. Crime in this country is through the roof. And we have a new form of crime. It’s called migrant crime. And it’s happening at levels that nobody thought possible.

DAVID MUIR: President Trump, as you know, the FBI says overall violent crime is coming down in this country, but Vice President the…

FORMER PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: use me, the FBI — they were defrauding statements. They didn’t include the worst cities. They didn’t include the cities with the worst crime. It was a fraud. Just like their number of 818,000 jobs that they said they created turned out to be a fraud.

There are new updated numbers from the National Crime Victimization Survey released this week. The NCVS is a useful tool, because while the more widely discussed FBI crime figures can only count crimes reported to the police, the NCVS surveys a large sample of Americans — around 240,000 people — and extrapolates from that. Some crimes, like murder, are almost always reported to the police, but other crimes, like assault, aren’t always going to be reported, for a variety of reasons.

Overall, the NCVS indicate that in 2023, the rate of nonfatal violent victimization in the United States was 22.5 victimizations per 1,000 persons age 12 or older, which was similar to the 2022 rate of 23.5 violent victimizations per 1,000 persons age 12 or older. Violent victimization includes rape or sexual assault, robbery, aggravated assault, and simple assault.

Ironically, the NCVS had lower numbers for violent victimizations for 2020 and 2021, despite the widespread perception that crime got significantly worse during the pandemic. In 2018 the figure was 23.8, in 2019 it was 21, it was 16.4 in 2020 — remember, lots of people were stuck at home, and fewer people on the street means less street crime — and in 2021 it was 16.5.

We can argue whether going from 23.5 violent victimizations per 1,000 persons to 22.5 violent victimizations is enough of a decline to argue, as Muir asserted, that “overall violent crime is coming down in this country.” But we can all agree that it’s not much of a decline. And note property crimes are up very slightly, from 101.9 incidents per 1,000 households to 102.2.

The good news is that in 2023, 44 percent of violent victimizations were reported to the police, an increase from 41.5 percent in the previous year. The bad news is that still means that more than half of all violent crimes — 52.6 percent — aren’t reported to police. And a few other points worth noting: “A smaller percentage of robbery victimizations that occurred in 2023 (42 percentage) than in 2022 (64 percentage) were reported to police, and the percentage of motor vehicle thefts reported to police decreased from 81 percentage in 2022 to 72 percentage in 2023.”

Steve Smith, a senior fellow in urban studies at the Pacific Research Institute, wrote in February, that declining rates of reporting crimes are “a dire indicator on many levels as it means that for a variety of reasons, crime victims are opting out of participating in the criminal justice system beyond their willingness to participate in surveys. This is not ‘normal’ or a ‘peace wave’ — but a concerning reality that people are losing faith in their country’s system of justice.”

In light of all this, it is not surprising that people are skeptical of the official statistics and believe that crime is going up.