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Did crime go up or down in 2022?

Here's an odd one. John Lott wrote a piece today claiming that the FBI has "quietly" revised their crime figures, and they now show that violent crime rose in 2022. This is all over the place on right-wing sites but hasn't been reported anywhere else, as near as I can tell.

Needless to say, this made me suspicious. And John Lott made me suspicious. But I downloaded the FBI's crime reports from 2022 and 2023 directly from their website, and sure enough: the FBI has revised all of its figures going back to 2016:

Most of the revisions are fairly small, and even the revision for 2022 isn't large. But the downward revision for 2021 was substantial, and that was enough to change the direction of the trend. Instead of being down -1.7%, violent crime was up 4.5%.

I'll add two things. First, the crime figures for 2021 are known to be unreliable for technical reasons, so no comparisons with 2021 should be taken too seriously in the first place. Second, the violent crime rate over the past decade has been pretty steady. There's just not much to see here for partisans on either side.

POSTSCRIPT: But for those of you who insist on some partisan spin, I've got you covered. The average annual number of violent offenses under Biden remains lower than it was under Trump: 1.224 million vs. 1.227 million. So there's that.

42 thoughts on “Did crime go up or down in 2022?

    1. SeanT

      In 2021, the FBI transitioned to a new data collection system called the National Incident-Based Reporting System

      law enforcement agencies were not prepared for the transition, leading to a dramatic drop in participation

      1. KenSchulz

        I spent a few minutes on the site. They developed a statistical method to estimate data for non-participating jurisdictions. There is a link to a paper explaining the method. They calculate confidence intervals for data based on estimation, but I didn’t see these on charts.
        There is a note that updated data was posted on September 23, 2024, but no explanation of the basis of the update, nor a link to an explanation.
        It’s not possible to readily see if any of the fluctuations are statistically significant; though the downloadable data might support the necessary analysis, in the hands of a competent statistician.

  1. gvahut

    Your y-axis scale choices always aggravate me. Minimizing the range maximizes the apparent differences, which in truth are pretty minuscule.

    1. kahner

      i understand what you mean, but i think he set the y-axis ranged to make the differences visible, otherwise the graph would be pointless. and since the post itself stresses how minor the changes are, i don't think it's misleading.

      1. ColBatGuano

        But the graph should be pointless. Emphasizing the "big" difference in 2021 and then explaining in the text is misleading for casual readers.

  2. jamesepowell

    It doesn't matter whether violent crime increased or decreased. According to the political media, what matters is whether people feel that violent crime has increased or decreased. And based on the hammering of crime stories by cable and local news, people feel like there is more crime now than at any time in history. So they disbelieve any reports to the contrary.

    1. iamr4man

      There’s a couple of things at play here, I think. One is that people conflate all street crime with “violent crime”. So reports of shoplifting and burglary, and even visible homelessness and weird behavior are all considered part of the “violent crime problem”. Second, when you go in to certain stores, mostly drug stores, lots of stuff is locked behind clear plastic shelves. I live in a relatively upscale area south of SF and in order to get some allergy medication I needed to ring a bell to summon a clerk with the key and that clerk didn’t even give me the item. They walked it to the cashier. That “feels” like crime is up.

        1. lawnorder

          The issue particular to courthouses is that the sort of people who would be thrown out of any other public building are dragged into courthouses. Naturally, there are safety concerns.

          1. KawSunflower

            Two days ago, I arrived at a Northern Virginia Kaiser Permanente and had to walk through a scanner, then open my purse for the security personnel to review its contents. This measure was adopted despite the fact that i was told that there have been no unlawful incidents. Any theirs weren't mentioned.

    2. illilillili

      What kind of people watch cable and local news? I've got more important things to do; a new episode of Survivor was just released.

  3. NotCynicalEnough

    Can't speak for the country as a whole but in the urban hellhole that is San Francisco, homicides are down 40% from last year and even last year was near historic lows with 42 year to date. It's possible SF is an outlier, but I would have to see a good reason to believe it. [Edit: and homicides are down 13% year to date in Oakland as well]

    1. different_name

      I'd be very curious about Mary's thoughts, too. She's been such an important part of Lott's career, in particular regarding his quantitative claims, that I really think in fairness to Lott we should withhold judgement until she chimes in.

  4. Jasper_in_Boston

    Here's an odd one. John Lott wrote a piece today...

    You should have stopped reading right there. There are hacks. And then there are dead-eyed, gaslighting sacks of shit. Lott is in the latter category.

  5. Justin

    Crime is out of control no matter if it went up or down in a given period. It's long been clear to me that Mr. Drum and many of his readers don't care because to acknowledge it disturbs their world view. I get it. I don't spend my time giving a crap about this violence. There isn't anything I can do about it. I don't know any of the victims. But I don't pretend it's not happening.

    https://www.wlky.com/article/new-albany-harvest-homecoming-shooting-victim-teen-suspects/62589890

    "Later, though, they determined that there were multiple shooters firing from different locations, including a person possibly firing from within the festival's carnival area. NAPD believes at least two groups of people were involved in the dispute and fired shots. Bailey said they have identified some persons of interest in the case, but since it is an ongoing fluid investigation, they cannot give details on them at this time. Bailey said, however, that all persons of interest they are trying to identify as shooting suspects are Black males in their teens and early 20s."

    This is the problem. Young, violent, well armed, black teens and early 20s. The whole violent crime problem is associated with this demographic.

    1. illilillili

      Ah, good to know the Sandy Hill child shooter was black. And the man who shot up that church. And the guy using a bump stock from a hotel window in Las Vegas when firing into a crowd of concert goers.

      Fuck you, racist.

      1. Justin

        The gun homicide rate for young Black boys and men ages 10 to 44 rose 43% over this time period. In 2022 alone, the Black firearm homicide rate among ages 15 to 19 was more than 25 times the white firearm homicide rate among the same age group.

        You can call the facts racist if you want. It doesn't matter to me. But you can't solve the problem if you ignore the main driver. On the other hand, crazy white kids (and there gun nut parents) are a special kind of problem worthy of some scrutiny.

        https://giffords.org/lawcenter/report/gun-violence-in-black-communities/

      1. Justin

        Well, Joel, I provided both the anecdote and the supporting data from Giffords.org. (Started by Gabby Giffords) so my larger point is made by the trollish replies. You don’t want to know the nature of gun violence and crime, but you want to be congratulated for some modest improvement. No, I think this tragic failure remains unaddressed.

    1. Five Parrots in a Shoe

      But if that tiny difference was in favor of Dickhead you can bet every talking head on FNC would be talking about it constantly.

  6. tango

    The premise that the actions of the president are significantly correlated to the crime rate is suspect. But people persist in evaluating presidents based on things that happened during their administration rather than for what they actually did and did not do.

    Nobody ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American people.

    1. lawnorder

      It's not just the president. There is relatively little the federal government as a whole can do about a problem that is mostly a matter of state law.

  7. raoul

    We need to see the murder numbers. Murder is a statistic that cannot be readily fudged so it tends to be accurate, on the other hand, it’s relative low number does not allow for general conclusions in particular areas. Nevertheless, for the country as a whole, the murder would clarify, though not necessarily resolve, the impact of Covid on crime.

  8. raoul

    I found the numbers. The murder rate suddenly spiked in 2020 and remained stubbornly high the next two years before coming down a significantly last year, though it still more than 10% higher than the pre 2020 baseline (which was near a fifty year low). So Covid had little impact on this number.

  9. rick_jones

    Second, the violent crime rate over the past decade has been pretty steady.

    Although a linear trend line applied via Mk I eyeball to the first chart suggests increase. In contrast to the second chart.

  10. Five Parrots in a Shoe

    Why does anyone still read John Lott? I mean, I get why MAGAts publish him, but why would anyone was common sense read him?

  11. KawSunflower

    I'd provide a +1 or more, but hope that their political careers are over before those phrases catch on. Vance is obviously a menace, but "The future is ours, not theirs " Youngkin is insidious in is manner and tactics.

    OK, I give up - while I typed this, it was clearly shown as being in response to dilbertdogbert.

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