“A new Bureau of Justice Statistics report, which includes data through 2024,” shows that violent crime in general has risen a great deal since 2020 and 2021, notes John Lott.
“In 2024, the rate of violent victimization in the United States was 23.3 victimizations per 1,000 persons age 12 or older…This rate was higher than the rate in 2020 (16.4 per 1,000 persons) and 2021 (16.5 per 1,000 persons). and was similar to the rate in 2022 and 2023. Violent victimization includes rape or sexual assault, robbery, aggravated assault, and simple assault,” reports the Bureau of Justice Statistics in Criminal Victimization, 2024.
As Lott notes,
The National Crime Victimization Survey shows violent crime surged 59%, with rape and sexual assault up 67%, robbery up 38%, and aggravated assault up 62% [since 2020]. That’s the largest four-year increase in the survey’s 52-year history.
The contrast with Trump’s first term is stark. The NCVS data shows that between 2017 and 2020, violent crime fell 15%, including a 6% drop in robbery and a 24% decline in aggravated assault. Although rape and sexual assault rose slightly, the increase was less than 10% of what occurred under Biden.
The federal government tracks crime in two main ways. The FBI’s Uniform Crime Reports count the number of offenses reported to police each year. The Bureau of Justice Statistics’ National Crime Victimization Survey, by contrast, annually asks about 240,000 people living in the United States whether they were crime victims. The latter method captures both reported and unreported incidents….Before 2020, the FBI and Bureau of Justice Statistics trends generally moved in tandem. Since then, they’ve diverged sharply: The FBI reports fewer crimes, while more Americans say they’ve been victimized. Unreported crime was always a factor….Another factor appears to have skewed the FBI data: the breakdown of law enforcement in this country. When people believe police won’t catch or prosecutors won’t punish criminals, they’re simply less likely to report crimes. Between 2010 and 2019, victims reported 63.3% of violent crimes to police. In the last three years, that number plummeted to 48.8%. Arrests fell as well – from 26.5% before COVID-19 to just 16.6% afterward.
Other factors also distort the FBI data. Many big-city police departments, such as D.C., have reclassified serious offenses, apparently in an effort to make the streets seem safer than they are. Downgrading aggravated assaults to simple assaults removes them from the FBI’s violent crime statistics, for example. Whether an attack counts as “aggravated” often depends on whether a weapon was used – but many progressive district attorneys now refuse to pursue weapons charges. That difference matters because the NCVS asks victims directly whether a weapon was involved, even if police reports omit it.
Progressive prosecutors in cities like New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles have also made a habit of reducing felony charges. In Manhattan, for example, the district attorney’s office downgraded felonies 60% of the time.
The National Crime Victimization Survey can’t cover murder, because murder victims are dead and thus can’t participate in a survey of violent crime victims. So the recent BJS report on Criminal Victimization, 2024 doesn’t cover murder. The homicide rate went up from 2019 to 2020 (partly due to the George Floyd effect and de-policing at the local level that followed George Floyd’s death), but probably fell in 2024 and the first half of 2025, and may now be below what the rate was back in 2020.
The homicide rate doesn’t necessarily rise when other violent crimes are rising, because higher survival rates among shooting victims due to improving medical care can reduce the homicide rate even when shootings and violent attacks are increasing.
Overall, “violence has gone up, but this is masked by the fact that more shooting victims are surviving due to improved medical care. Professor Paul Robinson and Jeffrey Seaman explain this in their new book Confronting Failures of Justice: Getting Away With Murder and Rape, available here.”
As they add:
serious crimes such as murder, rape, and aggravated assault are on the rise again, especially in urban jurisdictions, after falling from their peak in the early 90s….Modern violent crime rates are well above double the 1960 benchmark, mainly due to the explosion in aggravated assault….This data does not even account for the recent surge in homicides since 2019 which saw the murder rate rise by nearly 30% from 2019 to 2020. Even the 2019 data understates the size of the problem as the murder-rate comparison is deceptive: enormous advances in emergency medical care since 1960 have dramatically improved the survivability of a shooting or aggravated assault. Victims now arrive at hospitals sooner due to better ambulance and helicopter response times, and most hospitals now have dedicated trauma centers skilled in treating severe wounds. For example, serious gunshot wounds treated in hospitals increased almost 50% between 2001 and 2011 even as the death rate decreased, causing the murder rate to drop from 5.6 to 4.7. Studies show that if 1960s medical technology prevailed today, the murder rate would be more than five times higher than it is. In 2020, 22,000 homicides took place in America. Without modern technologies, this number would be closer to 110,000….Clearance rates in many large cities have reached truly abysmal levels. In 2022, in cities with populations larger than a million, only about 8.4% of violent crime and 1.4% of property crimes even led to an arrest.
Jailing criminals cuts the crime rate. When El Salvador increased its incarceration rate, its murder rate fell dramatically, and violence diminished. Jails keep repeat offenders locked up where they can’t commit more crimes. The typical state prison inmate has five prior offenses, and they commit more crimes after you let them out: 81.9% of state prison inmates released in 2008 were arrested again within a decade. Letting inmates out early increases the murder rate: Most murders in Baltimore are committed by people who previously were convicted of a serious crime, but didn’t serve a lengthy sentence for that crime. A peer-reviewed 2014 study in the American Economic Journal found that incarceration reduces crime through incapacitation.
To catch more criminals, America might need to spend more on its police. Europe spends more of its economy on its police than the U.S. does (it also has a lower murder rate, less than half of America’s). As Daniel Bier noted, “As a share of GDP, the EU [European Union] spends 33% more than the US on police.” “European countries almost uniformly spend a much larger share on police than US states, though just how much larger varies wildly.”
