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 hom
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