Violent crime in urban America soared 40 percent from 2019 to 2023 under the Biden-Harris administration, according to the latest National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS) run by the Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS) and administered by the Census Bureau.
The finding contradicts an establishment media narrative that crime fell under the Biden-Harris administration. For example, ABC’s David Muir made the claim when he tried to fact-check former President Donald Trump during the presidential debate.
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The data, published in September 2024, is based on official estimates of nonfatal criminal victimizations reported and not reported to police from BJS’s NCVS. The report describes the characteristics of crimes and victims via 230,000 U.S. residents who are asked if they have been the victims of crimes. The survey is the 51st in the series, dating back to the Nixon administration.
“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,” Jeffrey H. Anderson, the former director of the Bureau of Justice Statistics from 2017-21, reported of the data in the Wall Street Journal:
But crime hasn’t risen equally across the nation. America’s recent crime spike has been concentrated in urban areas. These are the areas in which leftist prosecutors have gained the strongest footholds, where police have been the most heavily scrutinized, and where lax enforcement and prosecution have become common.
The results aren’t pretty. 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.
The urban property-crime rate is also getting worse. It rose from 176.1 victimizations per 1,000 households in 2022 to 192.3 in 2023. That’s part of a 26% increase in the urban property-crime rate since 2019. These numbers exclude rampant shoplifting, since the NCVS is a survey of households and not of businesses.
In suburban and rural areas, in contrast, violent crime rates remain essentially unchanged since 2019.
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NCVS data is more reliable data for five reasons, Anderson reported. First, its figures are “finalized statistics.” Second, the FBI’s reporting system makes year-to-year comparisons “difficult if not impossible.” Third, the NCVS is a nationally representative survey. Fourth, the FBI is not a “principal statistical agency” by the federal government. Fifth, “the NCVS captures crimes whether they are reported to the police or not.”
More is here on skyrocketing crime rates under the Biden-Harris administration.
Wendell Husebo is a political reporter with Breitbart News and a former RNC War Room Analyst. He is the author of Politics of Slave Morality. Follow Wendell on “X” @WendellHusebø or on Truth Social @WendellHusebo.
