The Big Hoax: Crime Statistics

The legacy media take on Trump's crime crackdown in DC was to say that crime was aready declining there. For instance, from CBS News:

Identifying the specific causes of changes in criminal activity is complex because it can be driven by many factors – and local police data was already showing that reported crimes were trending downward in Washington prior to the president's action.

Violent crime, for example, in the two weeks prior to Aug. 7, was down about 20% already from the same period in prior years, according to the MPD data.

But the assertion that DC crime had already been declining is actually very questionable:

Last month, House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer (R-KY) informed Metropolitan Police Department (MPD) Chief Pamela Smith, in a letter, that his committee is “investigating disturbing allegations that DC crime data is inaccurate and intentionally manipulated.”

Comer told Smith that a whistleblower “with direct knowledge of internal MPD operations and crime data discussions” told his committee that “crime statistics were allegedly manipulated on a widespread basis and at the direction of senior MPD officials.”

. . . MPD District 3 Commander Michael Pulliam, was reported last month to have been under investigation for allegedly manipulating crime statistics for his district, although Comer told Smith in his letter that, “Unfortunately, this practice does not appear to be isolated, nor is it a recent development.”

MPD data had shown violent crime decreases across all seven police districts, although D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser said MPD leadership only found anomalies in data reporting in one district.

The whole aim of California's 2014 Proposition 47 was to define crime downward by reclassifying many felonies as misdemeanors:

Prop 47 identified six “petty” crimes—grand theft, larceny, personal drug use, forgery, and two types of check fraud—and reclassified them. It downgraded these crimes, including thefts with property values under $950 and illegal drug possession for personal use, from felonies to misdemeanors.

The conventional reaction has been to insist Prop 47 lowered crime rates:

Just-released statistics from the California Department of Justice show property crime rates reached their lowest levels ever reliably recorded in 2024 — before the anti-reform Proposition 36 ever took effect.

A decade of crime trends through 2024 refute the widespread alarm driven by viral videos, sensational news reports, anecdotes, and quips that 2014’s Proposition 47 reform increased property crimes. Property crime rates declined during much of the criminal justice reform era to reach record-low levels last year.

But according to the previous link,

Pre–Prop 47 discretion over charging felonies also provided the safeguard that people convicted of a felony are subject to closer supervision after release than those convicted of a misdemeanor. Individuals with a history of theft tend to pose more of a threat than those who commit theft once. But Prop 47 took away prosecutors’ ability to charge those repeat offenders with more serious felony crimes, instead treating all their crimes as misdemeanors, where the maximum sentence is 364 days in jail for some crimes, and only 180 days for theft.

Prop 47 was a significant shift in California’s approach to criminal justice, investing in the popular narrative that slashing incarceration while increasing spending on services would provide better outcomes for both defendants and public safety. Several previous studies, however, found that property crimes increased under Prop 47. One 2018 report found that Prop 47 may have contributed to a larceny theft increase of approximately 9% in California, compared with other states. Another study from that same year found a moderate increase in larceny and motor vehicle thefts. And a 2019 analysis found that property crime increased 5%–7%.

The study argues that reduced penalties shifted prosecutor decisions in how to charge defendants, and the increased likelihood that shoplifters wouldn't be prosecuted reduced merchants' willingness to report the crimes. Both of these factors would reduce overall crime statistics, but in places like DC, the impression of ordinary citizens has been that crime has become worse.

In addition, there have been pressures on police to fudge crime statistics downward for decades. For instance, in Atlanta,

Atlanta underreported crimes for years to help land the 1996 Olympics and pump up tourism, according to an audit commissioned by police and released Friday [2004].

Police in this relentlessly self-promoting city of the New South routinely altered or suppressed thousands of crime reports in a concerted effort “to improve Atlanta’s chances for selection,” the audit said, citing interviews with several officers.

“Crime incidents were downgraded, underreported and discarded,” the report said.

. . . Despite the distorted figures, Atlanta ranked No. 1 or No. 2 in violent crimes such as rape and murder in nine of the last 10 years, according to FBI crime data, which is compiled from reports submitted by police departments.

The same contradiction is reflected in the current debate. PBS fact checks Trump's claims about the DC crime rate:

Is Washington, D.C.’s homicide rate the highest of any city in the world? The chart Trump displayed showed the district’s 2023 homicide rate. But it did not have the highest homicide rate of cities around the world that year.

The Igarapé Institute, a Brazilian nonprofit organization, monitors homicide rates around the world. In its most recent data from 2023, 49 cities around the world had higher homicide rates than Washington, D.C.

Of those 49 cities, three are capital cities — Cape Town, South Africa; Kingston and St. Andrew, Jamaica; and Caracas, Venezuela. Trump specifically compared Washington, D.C.’s homicide rate with Bogotá, Colombia, and Mexico City. The district had a higher 2023 homicide rate than those two places.

. . . We rate Trump’s statement False.

The problem here is twofold. First, exactly where DC rates in a list of third-world hellholes with correspondingly high murder rates is a trivial question if it's on a top-50 list at all. Second, the ordinary populace has had a strong impression that whatever the crime rate, public spaces, parks, streeets, transit, front yards, sidewalks, are unsafe and unhealthy. To claim rhe rates surrounding these conditions are somehow decreasing is nothing but gaslighting.

What's been happening for several generations is fairly simple: the urban machines have found it to their advantage to privilege the criminal underclass, Marx's Lumpenproletariat. Their families don't want brothers, sons, or baby daddies in prison, so they'll vote for candidates -- judges, councilmembers, mayors, district attorneys -- who'll oppose cash bail and put offenders back on the street. Meanwhile, there's been an incentive to minimize crime statistics to conceal the actual effect of these policies. But this is nothing new.

It may be that the impact of well-publicized cases like those so recently in the news will begin to change overall publc attitudes. Certainly the sense that the Trump administration is actually doing something about the problems may have an effect as well.