New Survey Data Undermine Trump's Narrative of Rising Crime

Former President Donald Trump’s campaign, which last month falsely asserted that “homicides are skyrocketing in American cities under [Vice President] Kamala Harris,” subsequently switched to a more defensible claim, emphasizing the limitations of FBI crime data since it changed its reporting system in 2021. In particular, the campaign noted the sharp divergence between the FBI’s 2022 numbers and the results from the National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS), which does not cover homicides but asks about other offenses. That survey’s 2023 results, which the Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS) released last week, complicate Trump’s narrative of rising violent crime.

The new numbers indicate that the violent crime victimization rate fell slightly in 2023, although the change was not statistically significant. “Findings show that there was an overall decline in the rate of violent victimization over the last three decades, from
1993 to 2023,” BJS Acting Director Kevin M. Scott reports. “While the 2023 rate was higher than those in 2020 and 2021, it was not statistically different from the rate 5 years ago, in 2019.”

That observation is inconvenient for Trump, who wants to blame Harris for rising crime during the Biden administration. Leaving aside the plausibility of assuming that a president, let alone a vice president, has much influence on crime rates, Trump’s thesis relies on the assumption that violent crime is more common now than it was during his administration. But even according to the data source he prefers, the 2023 rate was statistically indistinguishable from the rate in 2019, his second-to-last year in office.

The NCVS did record a statistically significant drop the following year, when the violent crime victimization rate (excluding homicides) was 16.4 per 1,000 Americans 12 or older, down from 21 in 2019. The rate was 16.5 in 2021, rose to 23.5 in 2022, and fell slightly to 22.5 in 2023. No doubt Trump wants to take credit for the 2020 decrease. But by the same logic, he also should take the blame for the huge 2020 spike in homicides.

Because the NCVS includes crimes that were not reported to police, the Trump campaign argues, it presents a more accurate picture than the FBI’s numbers, especially given the decline in the percentage of law enforcement agencies participating in the FBI’s system since 2020. That drop in participation required the FBI to rely more heavily on estimates to account for missing data, magnifying the potential for error. But since the NCVS does not include homicides, it is not relevant to the question of whether they are in fact falling, and the downward trend reported by the FBI is broadly consistent with data from multiple sources covering various samples of cities, including AH Datalytics, the Council on Criminal Justice, and the Major Cities Chiefs Association.

When it comes to other violent crimes, however, the truth is harder to pin down. In 2020, the same year that the NCVS recorded a drop in violent crime, the FBI recorded a large increase in aggravated assaults as well as homicides. By contrast, reports of aggravated assault in the NCVS fell, although the two sources both recorded drops in robbery and rape.

In 2022, when the FBI reported an overall 2 percent decline in violent crime, the NCVS results indicated a whopping 75 percent increase. Again, the latter number does not include homicide, which according to the FBI fell by 7 percent in 2022. But it does include respondents’ reports of rape, which were up 58 percent, compared to the 6 percent drop estimated by the FBI; robbery, which rose by 47 percent according to the NCVS but only 1 percent according to the FBI; and aggravated assault, which more than doubled according to the survey but fell by 2 percent in the FBI’s tally.

That divergence can be only partly explained by a decline in the percentage of crimes reported to the police. According to the NCVS, 46 percent of violent victimizations were reported to police in 2021. That rate fell to 42 percent in 2022, then rose to 45 percent in 2023, according to Table 4 of the latest report.

There are other possible explanations for what happened in 2022. While the FBI’s 2022 numbers covered the calendar year, for example, the 2022 NCVS asked about crimes experienced from July 1, 2021, through November 30, 2022. Including the second half of 2021, when crime rates were higher according to the FBI, may have obscured the change between that year and 2022.

What about property crime? According to the NCVS, the property crime victimization rate fell in 2021, rose in 2022, and remained essentially the same in 2023. Last year, the BJS reported, “the number of property victimizations was comparable to that in 2022 but higher than the 12.8 million in 2019.” And “from 2022 to 2023, the rate of property victimization in urban areas increased from 176.1 victimizations per 1,000 households to 192.3 per 1,000.”

If Trump wants to argue, based on the NCVS, that crime is still rising, he could focus on property crime in cities. But the latest survey numbers do not support the claim that property crime in general is on the rise, since the 2023 rate is statistically indistinguishable from the 2022 rate. Nor do they support the claim that violent crime is rising. And they certainly do not support the claim that “homicides are skyrocketing,” which cannot be assessed based on the NCVS but is inconsistent with data from various sources in addition to the FBI.

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