The crime rate is up, the crime rate is down!

FRIDAY, JUNE 14, 2024

Two stories for two Americas: Is the crime rate going up as an ongoing part of our "American carnage?"

If your neighbors and friends watch the Fox News Channel, that's what they're frequently told.

Below, we'll link you to one example. For now, we'll recommend the detailed report by Kevin Drum which appears beneath this headline:

Crime is really and truly down in 2024

"Crime is really and truly down." To the extent that anyone's listening, that's what we're told in Blue America—and no, we aren't saying that statement is wrong.

Kevin's report is quite detailed. He starts with a tweet which voices "the current meme on the right." The tweet in question says this:

"Crime is not down. Crime reporting is."

That actually is a current meme on the right, as we'll show you below. For now, we recommend Kevin's report about the way the FBI gathers crime statistics. Among other things, you'll read this:

Crime is really and truly down in 2024

[...]

For many years the FBI used a crime-reporting system called SRS. But in 2016, after years of testing, they finally announced that they would switch to a substantially improved system called NIBRS by 2021. And they did. Not every police department was ready on time, but the participation level has been rising every year:

About 71% of all police department now submit crime data via NIBRS. Among the 15 largest cities, all are up and running—including New York City—except for Los Angeles and Jacksonville. Both will complete the transition later this year.

In addition, the FBI allows non-NIBRS agencies to report old-school SRS data, which is reformatted and then used to estimate crime in nonreporting cities. So the total agency coverage of the FBI's dataset is actually about 84%.

Now, the old SRS system had about 95% agency coverage, so the coverage of the current system is still lower than it used to be. However, as you might expect, the statisticians in the Department of Justice are keenly aware of this and spent years developing a set of sophisticated methods to estimate the full total...

As he continues, Kevin explains how those sophisticated methods work. Here is his final assessment:

DRUM (6/14/24): The upshot of all this is (a) participation is growing and nearly all big cities are now on board, and (b) the FBI's model accounts for missing cities and makes up for it. The NIBRS transition in 2021 was pretty messy, but since then the kinks have mostly been worked out and the current data is very reliable. Not perfect, but pretty good. If they say crime is down, then crime is down.

That's what you might hear in Blue America. In Red America, several million citizens watched Jesse Watters Primetime on the Fox News Channel this Wednesday night. 

The silly boy's report on crime came midway through his program. After video slips of urban mayhem, TV's silliest child said this:

WATTERS (6/12/24): Crime is so out of control, looters are back and there's not even a reason to riot...In New York, maniacs with knives are now lunging at cops.

So said TV's silliest boy, speaking to millions of viewers. To watch the entire segment, you can start by clicking here.

At 8:37 p.m., the silly child introduced someone who sounded like a reasonably credentialed guest. The first Q-and-A went like this:

WATTERS: Blatant and outrageous crimes occurring on a daily basis, coast to coast. But Biden is running for re-election, so the FBI is telling you crime is down.

Attorney and retired NYPD Inspector Paul Mauro. Paul, the FBI comes out and says crime is waaaaaay down. Is that true?

MAURO: No. All right, so let's just break it out in a very simple way, just from the get-go.

Mauro proceeded to "break it out" in the manner shown:

MAURO (continuing directly): Forty percent of the nation's police departments don't report up to the FBI with their crime numbers. 

WATTERS: Oh! Ha ha ha.

MAURO: And what a coincidence! Let's do the roll call—New York, L.A., Chicago, Baltimore. Washington, D.C., which is federal itself, they don't report to the FBI.

WATTERS: Ha ha ha ha ha.

MAURO: Consequently, what do they have in common? These are all big, blue cities that have high crime rates, and those numbers are not going into the UCR—that's what they're called—the UCR crime reports.

The segment proceeded from there. Already, we seem to have bumped into several gross contradictions.

We'll have more on this topic tomorrow. Kevin offered a detailed report, Watters brought on the juice.

This is the face of a major American problem. We aren't referring to our nation's crime rate. We're referring to a type of information war Blue America's corporate-paid thought leaders generally choose to ignore.

More on this problem tomorrow. At present, it qualifies as "the problem we all live with."