Q&A of the Day – The FBI’s Underreported Crimes
Each day I feature a listener question sent by one of these methods.
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Today’s Entry: Brian, With all the criminal illegals representing a massive new class of crimes, Democrats running defund the police efforts, and states like California literally releasing prisoners in unprecedented levels, it defies any logic to think crime rates could be plummeting nationally, but that’s exactly what we’re being told. The Wall Street Journal actually ran a head scratching piece that kind of grudgingly concluded crime is lower under Biden than under Trump. They cite multiple national crime reporting data sets. I simply cannot believe this is true. How are they cooking the books?
Bottom Line: It’s a great question with a very specific answer. The FBI isn’t cooking their books. Instead, they’re omitting whole chapters from them. I’ll explain what accounts for the phenomenon you’re describing but first let’s look at what’s been reported that you’re referring to. In the Wall Street Journal’s recent story headlined: Violent Crime Rate Falls Sharply After Pandemic Surge they note: Homicides and reported rapes both declined about 26% in the first three months of 2024 compared with a year earlier, data from the FBI's quarterly uniform crime report showed. Robberies were down about 18% and aggravated assault fell by about 13%, the FBI said. Reported property crime declined about 15%. As mentioned in today’s note, that’s especially confounding given the rampant illegal immigration that’s wreaked havoc in communities across the country.
As I’ve recently reported, government records specifically, the federal government’s Criminal Noncitizen Statistics database, shows that we’ve had a 626% increase in crimes committed by noncitizens since the onset of the Biden administration leading to a record number of crimes having been committed by noncitizens every year of the Biden administration. As I also demonstrated yesterday the average border crosser since the onset of the Biden administration is 3.3 times more likely to commit a crime compared to the average border crosser under the previous administration. In other words, one of two things would have to be happening in order for the FBI’s crime statistics to be showing meaningful decreases. Either all legal U.S. citizens found God and gave up crime (which is something worth praying for) leaving illegal immigrants with a criminal monopoly in the process, or there’s much more to the story. And the answer is the obvious one here. There’s much more to the story.
As you’ll often hear me say the most pervasive form of bias in news media is omission. Well, omission of information isn’t exclusive to news media, it’s also at the root of the FBI’s crime statistics. The fact of the matter is that crime statistics have been dramatically underreported by the FBI for the past three years – coincidentally (or perhaps not so coincidentally?) coinciding with the onset of the Biden administration. In 2021 the FBI underwent what they called a modernization process of their criminal reporting database. As was noted by The Marshall Project:
- By 2020, almost every law enforcement agency was included in the FBI’s database. Some agencies reported topline numbers, such as the total number of murders or car thefts, through the Summary Reporting System. Others reported granular incident data with details about each reported crime through the newer National Incident-Based Reporting System. Then it all changed in 2021. In an effort to fully modernize the system, the FBI stopped taking data from the old summary system and only accepted data through the new system. Thousands of police agencies fell through the cracks because they didn’t catch up with the changes on time. More than 6,000 law enforcement agencies were missing from the FBI’s national crime data last year, representing nearly one-third of the nation’s 18,000 police agencies.
And boom goes the dynamite. There’s your bombshell. The FBI’s database is showing decreases in crime rates ranging from 13% to 26%, based upon the type of crime but...with a third of the country’s police agencies not reporting any crimes to the federal government. Again, it’s a case of not knowing what we don’t know but if the average amount of crime committed by the reporting agencies was also taking place by the non-reporting agencies, we’d effectively see that not only have crime rates not decreased under the Biden administration, but rather that they have risen by anywhere from 7% to 20% based on the type of crime reported. It’s a not-so-minor detail that’s omitted by all news organizations that simply take the FBI’s most recent reporting at face value and report on it accordingly. This dynamic is also reflected in Gallup’s annual surveying.
Since 2000 Gallup has surveyed Americans annually as to whether they or someone in their household has been a victim of a crime within the past year. In 2020’s survey 20% of American households had at least one person who’d been a victim of a crime over the past year. Last year’s survey showed 28% of American households had been victimized by crime over the previous year. That’s certainly at odds with the FBI’s incomplete reporting of criminal activity that shows steady declines in crime. It does, however, fit neatly within the estimated increase in crime we’ve seen during that time that I’ve outlined. As always there are two sides to stories and one side to facts. These are the facts.