Trump's campaign falsely said violent crime is up. Here's what data actually shows

Donald Trump’s presidential campaign this week falsely claimed that violent crime is higher under the Biden/Harris administration.

Violent crime is down across the board.

According to the latest Uniform Crime Reporting data released this week, violent crime overall nationwide is down 3% from the year prior; murders are down 11.6%, rapes 9.4%, aggravated assaults 2.8% and robberies are down 0.3%.

The Trump campaign sought this week to try and discredit the UCR data, claiming that it presented an incomplete picture of crime in the United States.

“When (Vice President) Kamala (Harris) took office, the FBI changed how it collects crime data. As a result, they’re missing data from nearly a third of the nation’s law enforcement agencies — including from many of the most violent cities, such as Chicago, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Oakland, and New Orleans,” the Trump campaign said in a press statement.

This is incorrect.

While it’s true that many law enforcement agencies did not submit crime data to the UCR after the FBI switched systems in 2021, many law enforcement agencies — including those in Chicago, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Oakland and New Orleans — are once again submitting data to the UCR, as revealed by a search of the report.

“It was an issue, it is much less of an issue today,” said Magnus Lofstrom, lead criminal justice researcher for the nonpartisan Public Policy Institute of California.

Even where certain California law enforcement organizations briefly did not contribute to the UCR data, they still reported to the state Department of Justice, Lofstrom said.

“There were other ways to get crime data for those agencies as well,” he said.

The Trump camp points to data from another source, the National Crime Victimization Survey, and says that it shows that crime is at a higher rate now than when Trump was in office.

However, that report states that while the rate of violent crime victimization was higher in 2023 than in 2020 or 2021, “it was not statistically different from five years ago, in 2019.”

“The 2023 rate was higher than the 2020 and 2021 rates but was comparable to five years ago in 2019 and consistent with the overall downward trend since 1993,” that report notes.

All of the available criminal justice data shows that violent crime is trending downward, away from the brief spike that took place during the pandemic.

“There is no credible crime data source that points toward violent crime being at an all-time high,” Lofstrom said. “...They all point toward a picture that is indicating a return toward the violent crime rates that we saw before the pandemic.”

Lofstrom told The Sacramento Bee that the latest UCR data show that “we’re roughly where we were in 2018-2019, and those violent crime numbers are very low,” he said, adding that the current violent crime rate is just a fraction of what was recorded in the 1990s.

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