Violent crime rate increased under Biden-Harris admin: report

The report runs contrary to what much of the mainstream media has reported or cited in “fact-checks.” During the Sept. 10 presidential debate, moderator David Muir contradicted Donald Trump’s claim that there has been rising crime under the Biden-Harris administration.

The data is the assessment of official estimates of nonfatal criminal acts both reported and unreported to police by BJS and NCVS. The report documents crime and its victims as evidenced by 230,000 US residents who were asked whether they were a victim of a crime. The survey has been conducted for over 51 years.

“Excluding simple assault — the type of violent crime least likely to be charged as a felony — the violent crime rate in 2023 was 19 percent higher than in 2019, the last year before the defund-the-police movement swept the country,” Jeffrey H. Anderson, the former director of the Bureau of Justice Statistics from 2017-21, summarized the data for the Wall Street Journal:

But crime is not rising at the same pace everywhere in America, Anderson noted in his report. Urban centers are getting the worst of it, especially in Democratic-controlled cities with prosecutors who are soft on crime.

“The results aren’t pretty. According to the NCVS, the urban violent-crime rate increased 40 percent from 2019 to 2023. Excluding simple assault, the urban violent-crime rate rose 54 percent over that span. From 2022 to 2023, the urban violent-crime rate didn’t change to a statistically significant degree, so these higher crime rates appear to be the new norm in America’s cities,” Anderson wrote for the WSJ.

“The urban property-crime rate is also getting worse. It rose from 176.1 victimizations per 1,000 households in 2022 to 192.3 in 2023. That’s part of a 26 percent increase in the urban property-crime rate since 2019. These numbers exclude rampant shoplifting, since the NCVS is a survey of households and not of businesses,” he noted, without adding that shoplifters are not even being arrested in some cities because they are legally allowed to steal an approved amount of property.

Anderson called the NCVS data “finalized” and more reliable than the much-vaunted FBI reports because it is “difficult if not impossible” to compare the bureau’s statistics on a year-to-year basis and the FBI is not a “principal statistical agency.” But perhaps most importantly, the NCVS records all crimes – even those that are not reported to the police. This is in line with a report from the Coalition for Law Order and Safety that was reported on in the spring, showing that the FBI has undercounted violent crime.

In some urban centers such as in New York, some Voters in the city's suburbs are shifting from supporting the Democratic Party to GOP nominee Donald Trump as he has shared a law-and-order message, perhaps resonating more with citizens who agree that the Biden-Harris administration has failed to keep crime down while also allowing millions of illegals to cross the southern border.