Here’s something the right-wing media isn’t going to tell you: Crime this year (through Q3) has been plummeting compared to the same period last year.
In fact, property crime is on pace to be the lowest since 1961!
Most people think the U.S. crime rate is rising. They're wrong.
Crime in the United States has declined significantly over the last year, according to new FBI data that contradicts a widespread national perception that law-breaking and violence are on the rise.
A Gallup poll released this month found that 77% of Americans believe crime rates are worsening, but they are mistaken, the new FBI data and other statistics show.
The FBI data, which compares crime rates in the third quarter of 2023 to the same period last year, found that violent crime dropped 8%, while property crime fell 6.3% to what would be its lowest level since 1961, according to criminologist Jeff Asher, who analyzed the FBI numbers.
Link to FBI data is here:
FBI Crime Data Explorer
Violent crime is down in every population category, but down the most in cities over 1 million (which is down 15%).
Link to Jeff Asher's analysis is here:
Crime in 2023: Murder Plummeted, Violent and Property Crime Likely Fell Nationally
Detroit is on pace to have the fewest murders since 1966 and Baltimore and St Louis are on pace for the fewest murders in each city in nearly a decade. Other cities that saw huge increases in murder between 2020 and 2022 like Milwaukee, New Orleans, and Houston are seeing sizable declines in 2023. There are still cities like Memphis and Washington DC that are seeing increasing murders in 2023, but those cities are especially notable because they are the outliers this year, not the norm.
The problem with something like this, as usual, is that 95% of the population pays no attention to data like this and will base their opinions solely on whether they’ve read or heard about some recent crimes in their area, or if they know somebody whose car got broken into, or if they read on Twitter about some gangs robbing jewelry stores in LA, and other anecdotes like that. They will then extrapolate those anecdotes through the entirety of the US and conclude that crime is out of control. IOW, the problem is a population that doesn’t know or even care about data, statistics or facts, and make some conclusions based on some gut feelings they have derived from a few anecdotes they read or heard about. It’s really sad how willfully ignorant a large portion of the population is.