Shortly after the two ABC moderators entered the presidential debate on the side of Kamala Harris, there was a brief moment when Donald Trump pushed back. It happened when David Muir finished one of his drive-by “fact-checks,” concerning the crime rate in this country. The moderator intended to immediately ask Kamala Harris a question, so that Trump couldn’t respond. But Trump did respond, and the moderator had no answer to what he said. Watch:
If you’re going to debate a candidate, when you’re really supposed to be the moderator, then you should at least be able to debate. But Muir had no answer when Trump refuted his canned talking point about FBI data. He sheepishly had to pivot to Kamala, who started laughing awkwardly.
That’s because what Trump said was true.
This summer, when the FBI released its Quarterly Uniform Crime Report showing that crime was down, they didn’t include data from New York or Los Angeles. The NYPD and LAPD are the two biggest police forces in the entire country, but they didn’t report their data at all, apparently because they couldn’t comply with the FBI’s new data-tracking requirements in time. And that wasn’t particularly unusual. Back in 2022, roughly one-third of the country’s 6,000 police agencies didn’t report crime data to the FBI. This isn’t some partisan point I’m making. The FBI admitted all of this.
Yesterday, though, the FBI released its latest updated annual report. And the agency claims that this time around, the report comprehensively documents violent crimes that occurred in 2023 because the data comes from law enforcement agencies that cover more than 95% of the country’s population — including the NYPD and LAPD. According to the new data, car thefts went up by around 20% from 2022 to 2023. So that’s a massive increase. But violent crime was supposedly down overall by 3%, while “murder and non-negligent homicide” were down more than 10%. Reported rapes were down nearly 10% as well, and property crimes dropped 2.5%.
As you’d expect, Left-wing media outlets celebrated the news. They portrayed it as vindication for Kamala Harris and her debating partner, David Muir. Watch:
A few things about this report. First of all, several large police departments — including the NOPD and LAPD — didn’t report demographic data about these crimes to the FBI. If you pull up these police departments on the FBI’s website, you won’t be able to see the race and gender of assailants or their victims, for example. On social media yesterday, a lot of people interpreted this as proof that the NOPD and LAPD didn’t report violent crimes at all, but that’s not true. They did report violent crimes, but they left out information about who’s committing them, and who the victims are.
That’s still a notable omission — especially when the Biden administration and Kamala Harris are claiming that we live in a white supremacist hellscape, where it’s not safe for black people to go about their lives. And it’s an unexplained omission, too. My producers reached out to the FBI, LAPD and NOPD to ask why this data was missing, and we didn’t hear back.
But in general, the FBI’s numbers are being accurately reported by MSNBC and other mainstream outlets. If you think the FBI’s data captures all the crime that’s occurring, then yes, the data is a sign that this country is safer than it was a year ago. And that would be a good thing. The problem is that this data doesn’t, in fact, capture all the crime that’s occurring — or anywhere close to it. As even that MSNBC report conceded, the only way for the FBI to hear about crimes is if someone reports them to a police department in the first place. And that may not be happening as much as it should be, because people don’t have any confidence that police or prosecutors will do anything if they report a crime. Unless we’re talking about homicides — which are usually reported because it’s hard to conceal a body — this is a significant problem with the data.
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And the Biden administration itself acknowledges that. Earlier this month, the DOJ released a report entitled, “Criminal Victimization, 2023.” The report is unique in that it doesn’t rely on police department data. Instead, it captures non-fatal crimes that weren’t reported to law enforcement, using something called the National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS) which is administered by the Bureau of Justice Statistics and the Census Bureau.
As the DOJ puts it:
The NCVS collects information on whether crimes were reported or not reported to police and on the reasons why the crime was reported or not reported. Victims may not report a crime for a variety of reasons, including fear of reprisal or getting the offender in trouble, believing that police would not or could not do anything to help, and believing the crime to be a personal issue or too trivial to report.
The reason the DOJ collects this data is that, as it turns out, there are a lot of crimes that aren’t reported — far more than you might think. Quoting from the report:
Approximately 45% of violent victimizations were reported to police in 2023, which was not significantly different from 2022. The percentage of rape or sexual assault victimizations reported to police increased significantly, from 21% in 2022 to 46% in 2023. A lower percentage of robbery victimizations were reported to police in 2023 (42%) than in 2022 (64%). During this period, the percentage of overall property crime victimizations reported to police decreased from 32% to 30%, due in part to a decline in the reporting of motor vehicle thefts to police (from 81% to 72%).
So when you hear that the FBI reports that property crimes were down 2% in 2023, you have to keep in mind that according to the DOJ’s crime survey, only around a third of property crimes were reported to police in the first place. And the majority of other non-fatal violent crimes aren’t reported either.
The exception appears to be “motor vehicle thefts,” which are reported at a rate of more than 70%. And that just so happens to be the same category that, according to the FBI data, increased from 2022 to 2023. Although even 70% might seem remarkably low. How could 30% of car theft victims not even report it to the cops? Well, I actually have some personal experience here.
I had my car stolen out of a parking lot downtown a couple of years ago. I did report it to the police — and precisely nothing happened. A detective followed up a few days later, but that was it. I never heard another word about it. In fact I was told that they had eye witnesses and video of the perpetrators, but they were “a bunch of kids” and there wasn’t much that could or would be done. So if my car is ever stolen again, my incentive to report it will be much lower. I still will report it, because I need to report it in order for insurance to cover it. But that would be my only incentive. It’s also probably why car theft reports are so much higher, relative to other types of crime. In any case, the point is that a lack of enforcement has a very demoralizing effect on victims of crime.
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The takeaway from the DOJ’s survey is that, under the Biden administration, crime has increased across the board. Here’s how the Wall Street Journal summarized the survey data:
The NCVS report for 2023 finds no statistically significant evidence that violent crime or property crime is dropping in America. Excluding simple assault—the type of violent crime least likely to be charged as a felony—the violent crime rate in 2023 was 19% higher than in 2019, the last year before the defund-the-police movement swept the country.
The problem is particularly severe in major cities. This is something that’s also not captured by the reporting we’re hearing about the FBI’s data, but it’s true. Major cities are completely unrecognizable from what they were just a few years ago — and there’s no sign that this trend is going to change.
Again from the Journal:
According to the NCVS, the urban violent-crime rate increased 40% from 2019 to 2023. Excluding simple assault, the urban violent-crime rate rose 54% over that span. From 2022 to 2023, the urban violent-crime rate didn’t change to a statistically significant degree, so these higher crime rates appear to be the new norm in America’s cities.
Of course, there are reasons to be skeptical of survey data in general. The Bureau of Labor Statistics just admitted they overestimated job growth in this country by something like 800,000 jobs, and that was because the surveys they used — evidently — aren’t very reliable. But in this case, the DOJ’s survey has a few advantages over the FBI’s data. As I mentioned, it captures crimes that aren’t reported to the police. Additionally, the DOJ has been running this survey since the Nixon administration. But the FBI recently overhauled its data collection methods in 2022, which makes it very hard to compare year-to-year changes in crime. And that’s a major problem because it’s essentially impossible to establish a baseline for comparison with the FBI data. By contrast, with the survey data, we can get a broader look at the overall increase in crime under the Biden-Harris administration — not just looking at 2022 to 2023.
More to the point, there are plenty of other indicators that the DOJ’s survey is correct, and that America has become a more dangerous place to live under Joe Biden and Kamala Harris.
For one thing, you could go to any major city in the country and visit a C.V.S. or a Rite Aid, and see how many items are hidden behind glass. You can look at how police departments have shrunk all over the country, from New Orleans to New York. You can also look at some other indicators that no one’s talking about. For example, the “homicide victimization rate” in this country increased by 19% from 2019 to 2023. That’s a nearly 20% increase in the rate of people getting killed by other people, whether intentionally or unintentionally.
2023’s homicide victimization rate was still 19% above 2019’s. pic.twitter.com/STtbHpqkMP
— ~~datahazard~~ (@fentasyl) September 23, 2024
That seems like a significant jump, to put it mildly. But this is data that no mainstream media outlet will report. It’s only because of an account on X called DataHazard — which came up with the numbers by looking at death certificates — that we have this information at all. Think about that — we have a 20% increase in the “homicide victimization rate” in just four years. Any other country, at any other time in history, would call that a crisis.
But using that kind of language wouldn’t play well for Kamala Harris. So instead, her promoters are resorting to a familiar tactic. They’re selectively relying on data that helps their candidate, while ignoring the data that contradicts or complicates the narrative. It’s all part of an effort, once again, to convince you to ignore what’s happening right in front of you.
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They don’t care that more people are dying since 2019, or that most violent crimes are still going unreported. They only care about one thing, which is winning in November. So they’re disregarding all nuance in their reporting on this. But the rest of us — people who actually want to live in this country, regardless of who the president is — can’t accept that.
A government that will lie about the deaths of its own citizens will lie about anything. And after the one-sided, misleading response we saw to the FBI’s data yesterday, it’s clear that’s exactly the kind of government that Kamala Harris’ supporters want.
