Murder Rate Dropping Sharply

These statistics are subject to some manipulation, though mostly at the local level,* so it is less likely than with the 'happy-happy-joy' economic talk that the Feds are just blustering to try to re-elect Uncle Joe.

The new fourth-quarter numbers showed a 13% decline in murder in 2023 from 2022, a 6% decline in reported violent crime and a 4% decline in reported property crime. That’s based on data from around 13,000 law enforcement agencies, policing about 82% of the U.S. population, that provided the FBI with data through December.

“It suggests that when we get the final data in October, we will have seen likely the largest one-year decline in murder that has ever been recorded,” said Jeff Asher, a former CIA analyst who now studies crime trends.

They would like to blame the pandemic for the anomaly. 

Asher and other experts say the biggest factor behind the drop in crime may simply be the resumption of anti-crime initiatives by local governments and courts that had stopped during the pandemic.

“After a terrible period of underfunding and understaffing caused by the pandemic, local governments have, by most measures, returned to pre-pandemic levels,” wrote John Roman, a criminologist at the University of Chicago. In an interview, Roman said, “The courts were closed, a lot of cops got sick, a lot of police agencies told their officers not to interact with the public. Teachers were not in schools, not working with kids.”

Asher said, “The tools that we ordinarily have used to interrupt these cycles of violence were gone in 2020 [and] 2021.”

While the social chaos caused by all the pandemic emergency measures may have had some effect, I strongly suspect that the real reason for the increase was the BLM movement's success at making police afraid to do their jobs, while undermining government funding for policing. Suddenly police were in danger of prosecution if a stop went bad, risking decades in prison or potentially capital charges. Suddenly, Democratic hostility to police was so stiff that, e.g., the city council in Asheville refused to pay for police body armor -- at once increasing the risk of policing, and demonstrating clearly that police did not have and could not expect the support of their own government. 

So yeah, they pulled back. Small wonder. Since the risk of being caught was down, the perceived cost of the crime was lower. That being the case, it's simple economics why the murder rate went up.

* The FBI Uniform Crime Report has been an occasional topic of this blog from the early years. It's a problematic report in a lot of ways, most especially in that it depends on local reporting. Local agencies don't collect the data in the same way, which means that it's not at all clear that there's an apples-to-apples comparison from one jurisdiction to another. Only some crimes are tracked, so a difference in standards between jurisdictions in how to charge an offense can create noise. 

There is also some outright manipulation. Tourist towns and college towns especially tend to manipulate by doing things like reporting burglary, a tracked crime, as 'trespassing,' which doesn't make the report. "Rape" is often reclassified by college police as "sexual assualt" in order to keep campus rape numbers apparently low. The FBI occasionally messes with the numbers as well, but it's more commonly corrupt local police chiefs who want to artificially decrease their numbers.