Bad Data: Reports of Decreasing Crime Are Lies
Bad Data: Reports of Decreasing Crime Are Lies
Unveiling the truth behind federal crime statistics: reports of decreasing crime rates are intentional misinformation
I used to hear people dismiss statistics. “There are three kinds of lies: lies, damn lies, and statistics.” Others claimed anyone can make statistics say anything you want. One of my most meaningful classes, the one that adds value to my life everyday, was statistics. It was a night class taught at my community college by an adjunct instructor whose day job was at a ninth-grade center. I can’t do the math of deviations and bell curves but he taught the class not to be fooled by deceptive studies, reports, and even advertising. My final score in the class was 79.5. He gave me a B.
NBC News reports: ‘Yet 92% of Republicans, 78% of independents and 58% of Democrats believe crime is rising, the Gallup survey shows. “I think we’ve been conditioned, and we have no way of countering the idea” that crime is rising,” Asher said. “It’s just an overwhelming number of news media stories and viral videos — I have to believe that social media is playing a role.”’ Asher is out of touch.
Researching the article Mass Incarceration Myths Fuels Calls for Police Reform, published last month, I was reviewing the Prisoners in 2022 – Statistical Tables, a Department of Justice (DOJ) publication from the Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS) buried in the report was troubling methodology.
The BJS has been a part of the DOJ for 44 years and their 37.7-billion-dollar budget in 2023. The bureau is organized under the Office of Justice Programs which distributes 5 billion dollars to state and local governments. In other words, more than 32 billion dollars is retained at the federal level for programs that include federal prosecutors, the FBI, the Marshalls, ATF, and the DEA. According to the report, there were about 159,000 prisoners in federal prison and over one million in state prisons.
The NPS (National Prisoner Statistics program) collection has historically included counts of prisoners in the combined jail and prison systems of Alaska, Connecticut, Delaware, Hawaii, Rhode Island, and Vermont. This is important because this means that the figure of prisoners in state prisons is knowingly inaccurate. The BJS, the agency that exists to furnish accurate justice relevant statistical information, cannot even separate the jail and prison stats for six small states. (Alaska is the largest state by land mass with the smallest population. Rhode Island is geographically the smallest state but exceeds Alaska’s population by more than 350,000.) This becomes the paradigm for all of the data and publications from BJS. Even if they are right, they lack the credibility to be believed. But they know that they are not right and don’t do the work to get it right. I can’t imagine not getting it right with no more effort than a dozen phone calls.
Ongoing inaccuracy
In 2014, the Washington Post and others reported a misleading trope. They claimed that there was no real accurate record on how many people were killed by police. In fact, based on the manner all homicides are reported there was a predictable yet miniscule error. The margin of error was in the teens and twenties. Most years barely more than 1,000 people died in policing encounters, with more than 50% being armed white males attacking cops or resisting arrest. Not too bad in jurisdiction of 330,000,000 that stretches from Lubec, Maine, 7,938 miles west to Guam. However, activists agitate using statements accusing the United States Government of not tracking how many of its citizens are killed by the police.
This led to the Post, in the spirit of Katharine Graham who boldly published Watergate and the Pentagon Papers, to begin a registry of suspect deaths by police on the premise that crowdsourced information would bring clarity to official numbers. This also motivated the propaganda arm of Black Lives Matter to create their own registry called Mapping Police Violence by Samuel Sinyangwe and Deray Mckesson.
They didn’t stay friends for long. Expanding on a Twitter thread he wrote earlier this week, Sinyangwe told The Daily Beast that all of the data and research he compiled for his own nonprofit, Mapping Police Violence project (MPV), which tracks American police killings by year, location, and victim identity, has been “completely copied and stolen by DeRay and Campaign Zero as retaliation.”
Mapping Police Violence is a corrupt resource
They allege that more than 100 unarmed black people and people of color were killed by police violence in 2014. Here are just a few of their examples:
Example #1: ‘George V. King spent the night in the hospital for a reaction to dental work medication. After an unknown procedure, and possibly taking Keppra the next day, King allegedly became "agitated and combative" about not being immediately released. Two officers arrived and tasered King once while 5-10 hospital workers tried to secure him to a gurney. He resisted, was drive-stunned four times, and was given a sedative. He suffered a cardiac arrest, went into a coma and died 7-8 days later. He was 19 years old.’
The truth: “Baltimore prosecutors have declined to file charges against a police officer for using a stun gun on a 19-year-old hospital patient who fell into a coma and died days later.
Prosecutors said Tuesday that the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner ruled that 19-year-old George Vonn King Jr. died of natural causes. King was a patient at Good Samaritan Hospital when a police officer used a stun gun to subdue him during a struggle on May 7. The autopsy found that King died of meningitis and an abscess in his spine.”
Example #2: Barnesville, GA: An on-duty officer struck Justin Sullivan and Quentin Byrd as the two were crossing a highway around 1 a.m. The officer was treated for injuries at a nearby hospital. Quentin was 21 years old.
The truth: The accident happened just after 1 a.m. on Ga. 7 near Grove Street in Barnesville, according to the Georgia State Patrol. “Initial indication is the two men killed were crossing the southbound lanes of the four-lane highway when they were struck in the travel lane by a southbound Barnesville police patrol car,” GSP spokesman Gordy Wright said in an email. Wright identified the two men as Justin Sullivan, 25, and Quentin Byrd, 21, both from Barnesville.
Example #3: Delray Beach, FL: Deputies in Florida shot Anesson Joseph after he beat several victims. Deputies tasered Joseph, but he continued "ranting and raving". Joseph was naked. One cop opened fire and shot Joseph in the torso and twice on his lower body. He was taken to Delray Medical Center where he later died. He was 28 years old.
The truth: This was national news and if you were a news consumer ten years ago you likely remember this vividly. The headline was ‘Rampaging Face-Eater Anesson Joseph Was Locally Known Hipster and Artist.’
‘In the 45 minutes before he was shot, Joseph, 28, had beaten a retired cop and bitten a teenager's face, apparently choosing victims at random. When the deputies found him, he was speaking incomprehensibly, holding something metallic in his hand, flexing his muscles and moving from side to side. He looked, one of the deputies later said, "like a demon." Deputy Jesus Pujol, the unarmed deputy at the scene of the fatal exchange, told investigators Joseph looked like a demon, saying there was "no real other way to describe it. "I'm like, this guy is either, you know, mentally going through something serious right now or on drugs," he said, according to the report. "I mean his eyes were as big — I mean, I've never seen anything like that."’
If you can’t trust the data, you can’t trust the stats
Everyone is noticing that crime is rising. According to a recent Gallup poll 77% of Americans notice that crime is bad and getting worse. Yet that conflicts with what our national crime reports suggest.
“In 2022, 31% of the 18,000 law enforcement agencies across the U.S. failed to report crime data to the FBI's national database after transitioning to a new data collection system, according to the latest statistics from the FBI. Participation has improved since 2021 when almost 40% of the agencies were missing.”
“The FBI’s voluntary collection of data from police across the country has long been an important gauge for understanding crime in the United States, but the drop in the number of agencies reporting means the report relied much more heavily on estimation, said Ames Grawert, senior counsel at the justice program at the Brennan Center for Justice. The findings could mean that crime rates are leveling off, but it’s hard to say for sure.”
“Some large police departments began to report data to the FBI again in 2022, like the Miami-Dade Police Department. But the two largest police agencies in the U.S., the New York Police Department and the Los Angeles Police Department, are still missing in the federal data.”
Today, according to the BJS our most reliable data on crime is from the National Crime Victimization Survey. ‘“The vast majority of crime is not reported to law enforcement per the Bureau of Justice Statistics of the US Department of Justice. Based on the National Crime Victimization Survey, 42 percent of violent crime is reported. Thirty-two percent of property crimes are reported to the police and eventually, the FBI. It’s dramatically less for juvenile and cybercrimes.’
The cornerstone of combating false crime statistics is to ensure the accuracy and integrity of crime reporting. We clearly don’t have that now and must have it for tomorrow.
Please keep all our law enforcement officers, and all those who support them in your prayers.
Roland Clee served a major Florida police department as a Community Service Officer for more than 26 years. His career included uniformed patrol, training, media relations, intelligence, criminal investigations, and chief’s staff. He writes the American Peace Officer newsletter, speaks at public safety, recruiting and leadership conferences and helps local governments and public safety agencies through his business, Command Staff Consulting. His work is featured on LawOfficer.com, the only law enforcement owned major media player in the public safety realm.
References
https://www.pressherald.com/2022/12/22/new-crime-data-collection-system-doesnt-reflect-crime-wave/
https://www.governing.com/urban/why-its-confusing-to-know-whether-crimes-really-up-or-down
https://www.crimeinamerica.net/crime-is-up-crime-is-down-whos-right/
https://www.wbaltv.com/article/no-charges-for-cop-who-used-stun-gun-on-patient/7089982
https://www.ajc.com/news/duty-police-officer-hits-kills-pedestrians/boMr6IYa8IykVXr1B3fpOO/
https://www.sun-sentinel.com/news/fl-xpm-2014-07-07-fl-naked-man-full-report-20140707-story.html
https://twitter.com/samswey/status/1488606309674991616?s=20&t=ow4_Bb8VOS9_eLHaV6tWTg
https://bjs.ojp.gov/library/publications/prisoners-2022-statistical-tables
https://www.themarshallproject.org/2023/07/13/fbi-crime-rates-data-gap-nibrs
https://news.gallup.com/poll/544442/americans-crime-problem-serious.aspx
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/people-think-crime-rate-up-actually-down-rcna129585
Been fighting the mythic crime decline all over the place. The truth is, we don't really know officially if crime is up or down. If you watch the news or drive in any major city, you probably think crime is up. In more rural places, you might not notice any year-over-year change.
Biden, unwisely in my opinion, transitioned from UCR (used since 1930) to NIBRS in 2021. Should have continued to use UCR while agencies figured how to switch, but they did it cold turkey. Consequently, most agencies ceased reporting. So our eyes, lived experience, and common sense is the only way to guage the crime level.
Eventually, they'll have enough NCVS data to triangulate the missing period. But academic reports like this lag by years. My guess, in 2025 (if Trump succeeds), the liberal media will conclude crime is up and lay it all on Rs.
This is EXCELLENT reporting. Thank you for distilling this important topic.