Conservatives and right-wingers have been beating up progressives over the issue of crime. This is an age-old dynamic, but it has been particularly bad for Democrats recently because murder rates spiked up during COVID.
The political problem is intensified by the fact that the FBI is very slow to provide official crime statistics (we’ll get 2023 in September or October 2024), and the media continues its “if it bleeds, it leads” habit daily. Even if a resident’s own neighborhood seems to be getting safer, people think there are crime sprees going on everywhere around them.
But, in fact, quoting from Jeff Asher’s excellent crime analysis blog:
The FBI released quarterly data covering all of 2023 yesterday preliminarily showing a widespread decline in crime nationally last year. There was a 13 percent decline in murder in 2023 relative to 2022, a 6 percent decline in reported violent crime, and a 4 percent decline in reported property crime based on data from just over 13,000 agencies that reported quarterly data through December. The declines were fairly uniform regardless of city or county size with the exception of rising auto thefts in bigger cities and counties. The decline in murder in 2023 is likely the largest one-year decline ever recorded.
Although the data is preliminary, it covers 82 percent of the US population and is an excellent estimate of what the final numbers will say next fall. In fact, the numbers for murder are unlikely to change much at all because those crimes are publicized shortly after discovery—there’s not much to reassess. 2023 had, in fact, the largest one-year decline in murder ever recorded (that is, since the numbers began to be compiled in 1960).
The question is, can we get our own newspapers, TV news stations and other mainstream news sources to cover this enormously important story?