Crimes in major urban areas are much higher than they were in 2019, and in some cities, continued to rise in 2022 and 2023. For example, the Free Beacon reported last month that there had been “863 carjacking incidents in Washington, D.C., this year. That’s a 106 percent increase compared with last year and a 600 percent increase compared with 2019. Nearly three in four carjacking incidents in 2023 involved a firearm, and the majority of individuals arrested were juveniles.” Killings have also skyrocketed in Washington, DC, up 36% to 267 killings since 2022 according to the city’s police department. Channel 9 reported that the number of killings in the city already had topped “2021’s total for the year, which was the highest since 2003. That means the homicide rate in the District is the highest it’s been in 20 years, and climbing, with two months left in the year.”
But you wouldn’t know if from media reports, which rely on incomplete crime data that omits large urban areas, such as America’s two biggest cities, New York City and Los Angeles. The former head of the federal Bureau of Justice Statistics explains in “Urban Crime Wave“:
Despite what it calls the “widespread national perception that law-breaking and violence are on the rise,” NBC News maintains that the opposite is true: “Americans believe crime rates are worsening, but they are mistaken.”…The best available statistics, however, indicate that crime has risen dramatically in America’s urban areas, and little reliable evidence suggests that this crime wave has started to recede. NBC … and others are resting their claims on preliminary FBI data. As I have explained in highlighting the widening crime gap between California and Florida on their respective governors’ watches, the FBI’s statistics aren’t wholly reliable. This is even truer of the FBI’s preliminary statistics.
In 2021, the FBI stopped allowing “summary” reporting from states and localities and started mandating “incident-based” reporting, which provides more detail. Many law-enforcement agencies, however, didn’t make that switch on the FBI’s timeline, leaving the bureau with very incomplete national data. For example, in 2022, the most recent full year for which the FBI has released statistics, 17 percent of law-enforcement agencies didn’t report to the bureau. Among those not reporting were the New York, Los Angeles, and San Francisco Police Departments.
Preliminary FBI statistics are even less reliable. They are not final, they don’t cover the whole year, and 26 percent of agencies didn’t report. That amounts to more than 5,000 agencies not providing data, including some of the nation’s largest. Yet based on these preliminary and partial-year numbers, with more than a quarter of agencies missing, the mainstream media tout an 8 percent drop in violent crime from 2022 to 2023. That’s far from a definitive number.
Even if the FBI’s statistics were based on far more thorough reporting from police departments and sheriff’s offices around the country, many crimes aren’t reported to law enforcement. According to the 2022 National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS), 58.5 percent of violent crimes—and 68.2 percent of property crimes—were not reported to police. That’s according to the victims of those crimes.
The NCVS, which dates to the Nixon administration, is the nation’s largest crime survey and one of the largest federal surveys on any topic. It’s designed to register crimes that people, for whatever reason, chose not to report to police—as well as to unearth more information about any crimes that are committed. The NCVS is run by the Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS), which I directed from 2017 to 2021.
According to the most recent NCVS statistics, the number of violent victimizations rose from 5.8 million in 2019 to 6.6 million in 2022—an increase of 14 percent. Excluding simple assault—the least serious of the violent crime categories (and the one least likely to be prosecuted as a felony)—the rise in violent victimizations was 37 percent. After adjusting for population growth, the increases were 12 percent (overall) and 34 percent (excluding simple assault). Meantime, the number of unique victims of violent crime rose from 3.1 million in 2019 to 3.5 million in 2022—an increase of 15 percent. Excluding simple assault, the number of unique victims went up 26 percent.
The rise in crime from 2020 (or 2021) to 2022 was even starker than from 2019 to 2022….One of the most striking things in comparing crime rates from 2019 and 2022 is seeing where the increase in violent crimes occurred—and here the American people’s common sense appears to be spot-on. The NCVS classifies whether crimes happened in urban, suburban, or rural areas. By far the largest crime spikes were in urban areas.
In suburban areas, the violent crime rate went from 22.3 violent victimizations per 1,000 residents ages 12 and over in 2019 to 23.9 per 1,000 in 2022, an observed 7 percent increase that was apparently not statistically significant at the 95 percent confidence level. In rural areas, the rate went from 16.3 to 15.4 per 1,000, an observed 6 percent decrease that was also not statistically significant. In urban areas, however, the rate per 1,000 rose from 21.1 in 2019 to 33.4 in 2022—a whopping 58 percent increase that was quite statistically significant.
The property crime rate also stayed relatively constant in suburban and rural areas while rising 15 percent in urban areas—going from 153.0 to 176.1 victimizations per 1,000 households (statistically significant at least at the 90 percent confidence level)….In short, violent crime rates rose dramatically in urban areas from 2019 to 2022, and we have no clear indication yet whether they have risen or fallen since. We’ll know somewhat more when the official 2023 FBI figures are released early next fall, and far more when the 2023 NCVS comes out around that same time. If crime in the cities has indeed dropped, it seems a safe bet that it hasn’t fallen back anywhere close to pre-Covid levels, at least when taking into account crimes not reported to police (but captured in the NCVS). The media may want to believe that our cities have become safe again overnight, but the most reliable statistics, as well as Americans’ daily experiences, say otherwise.
One thing cities could do to reduce the crime rate and prevent killings is to incarcerate more people. When El Salvador increased its incarceration rate, its murder rate fell dramatically, and violence and crime fell enormously. Jailing more criminals saved thousands of lives in El Salvador.
Most DC carjackers are juveniles, because juvenile carjackers are swiftly released after being arrested. In 2021, two teenage girls aged 13 and 15 carjacked and killed an Uber Eats Driver in Washington, DC, a crime for which they received only juvenile detention, not prison. Juveniles often do only a short stint in juvenile detention for violence or serious crimes that would land an adult in prison for a substantial period of time. Juveniles are more likely to commit a crime if they know they won’t be imprisoned for it. “A 12-year-old responsible for emailing seven bomb threats to Maryland schools this month knew a state law would prevent authorities from bringing charges, police announced Wednesday,” reported NBC News last month. As a result, he went ahead and emailed the bomb threats. When states raise the age of responsibility for criminal acts, that increases the crime rate among juveniles, because they know that instead of going to jail for a substantial period of time, they get only a short stint in juvenile detention. As criminology professor Peter Moskos notes, “Recidivism among 16-year-olds went up” a lot when the age for being prosecuted in adult court was raised in New York. Restrictions on punishment of violent juveniles have resulted in out-of-control, dangerous juvenile jails where guards and inmates alike are attacked.
Longer prison sentences also deter violent crimes and theft by people who are not currently incarcerated. Crime in California fell significantly after California voters adopted Proposition 8, which mandated longer sentences for repeat offenders who kill, rape, and rob others. A National Bureau of Economic Research study found those longer sentences deterred many crimes from being committed. As it observed, three years after Proposition 8 was adopted, crimes punished with enhanced sentences had “fallen roughly 20-40 percent compared to” crimes not covered by enhanced sentences. Similarly, a 2008 Santa Clara University study found that longer sentences for three-time offenders led to “significantly faster rates of decline in robbery, burglary, larceny, and motor vehicle theft,” even after controlling for pre-existing crime trends and economic, demographic, and policy factors. Studies of countries with short prison sentences have found that letting criminals out early increases the crime rate, making longer prison sentences a good investment.
Washington, DC has increased its crime rate by letting murderers out of prison early through its “second-look” law, the D.C. Incarceration Reduction Amendment Act. 82% of inmates seeking release have been released under its recently-enacted second look law. As the Washington Post reported, “So far, D.C. judges have ordered the release of 135 people under the law….Twenty-nine requests were denied, according to the data. Of those released, the majority had been convicted of murder.” The Post was discussing this in a news story about a rapist who was seeking release even though he raped three women and forced the victims to dig their own graves.
Some of those released return to a life of crime. DC’s second look law has already “has led to 135 defendants being released early, of whom 28 have been rearrested,” according to the Daily Caller. That’s a 21% reoffense rate, even though most of those released inmates were released very recently (in 2022 or 2023), and reoffense rates rise over time as more and more inmates return to a life of crime. For example, when the U.S. Sentencing Commission looked at reoffense rates over a longer 8-year period, it found that violent offenders returned to crime at a 63.8% rate. Even among those over age 60, 25.1% of violent offenders were rearrested.
