Fewer Americans report offenses

NICK EICHER, HOST: Today is Wednesday, October 30th.

Thank you for turning to WORLD Radio to help start your day.

Good morning. I’m Nick Eicher.

LINDSAY MAST, HOST: And I’m Lindsay Mast.

Coming next on The World and Everything in It: crime in America.

Is it going up or down? Seems straightforward enough.

But getting the right answer is not so simple.

EICHER: In the presidential debate last month, former president Donald Trump said crime was up. But he got “fact checked” by moderator David Muir.

TRUMP: Crime in this country is through the roof. And we have a new form of crime. It's called migrant crime. And it's happening at levels that nobody thought possible.

MUIR: President Trump, as you know, the FBI says overall violent crime is actually coming down in this country, but Vice President the...

TRUMP: Excuse me, the FBI -- they were defrauding statements. They didn't include the worst cities. They didn't include the cities with the worst crime. It was a fraud.

What the TV moderator said was true at the time. Because the F-B-I did say that its 20-22 stats had a decrease of 2.1 percent.

Problem is, Trump was also right that the F-B-I was wrong. As a few weeks later, the bureau would walk those stats back. It revised the numbers and now they show that violent crime had actually gone up by 4.5 percent, a swing of almost 7 percentage points.

MAST: Why is it so hard to get accurate, up-to-date crime statistics in America? WORLD senior writer Emma Freire finds out.

REGLER: [opening door] It’s nice to meet you.

EMMA FREIRE: Sandra Regler knows a lot about crime and how it gets reported. She’s a former police officer and she has a box full of badges and diplomas.

REGLER: This might be dusty. But these are all patches from all of the people who were in the class. All jurisdictions that were represented. This I think is my … no, this is my detective badge.

She served for 25 years in Howard County in Central Maryland before retiring in 2009. Howard County is a mixed bag in terms of crime, but it's one of the top 10 wealthiest counties in America, and citizens there were diligent about reporting crimes when they happened.

REGLER: In Howard County, my thought, my feeling overall, was the community always demanded a high level of service. They expected it. This is a wealthy county. It's a very educated county. We pay a lot of money in taxes. We want good police services.

Today, her experiences with crime are usually as a victim. She lives in Baltimore in a cozy red brick house.

Her husband bought this house as a bachelor and she moved in when they got married 37 years ago. But the city has deteriorated around them over time.

REGLER: They often break in our cars. They come up and down our front street all the time, pulling doors. If you have something, they'll smash the glass out. Most people in this neighborhood have learned you don't leave anything in the car. You just don't.

But she usually doesn’t bother to make a report to the Baltimore police department.

REGLER: Is it really going to serve a purpose in them deploying resources? No, no, they're not coming. They're not driving through our streets doing random patrol. They're not even doing traffic Stops for the most part.

And that means those crimes are not included in the FBI’s crime statistics. But that official count isn’t the only way the U.S. tracks crime rates.

The government also publishes the annual National Crime Victimization Survey, which asks Americans about their personal experiences. It can capture crimes that are not reported to police.

MANGUAL: One of the insights that we get from that, is that most crime just isn't reported.

That’s Rafael Mangual. He works at the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research.

MANGUAL: And so what the FBI is reporting is just the crimes that are actually reported to police. There seems to be a growing gap between the National Crime Victimization Survey and the more recent outputs from the FBI.

The National Crime Victimization Survey indicates only about 45 percent of violent crimes and 30 percent of property crimes get reported to police. The survey makes it clear that, yes, crime in America is up - significantly.

Mangual thinks one reason crimes don’t get reported is the crisis of police recruitment and retention. It started around 2018 and has gotten much worse since 2020. This has led to sharp increases in police response times in some locations.

MANGUAL: That matters, because there is research that tells us that as response times go up, the likelihood of a successful report actually being made to police goes down.

Collecting statistics about crimes that are reported isn’t simple either. How crimes get categorized can be subjective. Moreover, America has over 18,000 local police departments and some of them are tiny, so they may struggle with record keeping.

MANGUAL: I think ultimately, this is going to require investment. You need to build out an infrastructure within departments to report accurately and categorize and communicate those data in a way that you know makes it easy for the FBI to make sense of them, and, you know, for it all to get reported. It is strange to me that in the richest country in the world, it takes: we have, it's like a nine month waiting period between the end of the year when the crime statistics for the prior year actually end up coming out.

However, policymakers don’t seem interested in making that investment. Mangual is troubled by the way crime statistics have become politicized.

MANGUAL: You have a significant portion of the country expressing concern about their own personal safety, and you have one political party telling them to be quiet and that this is not so bad.

For her part, Regler says she would be happy to move out of Baltimore but her husband isn’t ready to leave.

REGLER: He's very attached to this community and to the city because I think he remembers what it used to be like. It used to have a vibe. The street, I'd walk up half a block to my church. There was this generalized vibe and a sense of safety and a sense of community. After 37 years, that sense of safety and community is no longer here.

Reporting for WORLD I’m Emma Freire in Baltimore, Maryland.

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