Donald Trump has made the issue of crime a cornerstone of his campaign. He says violence in America is out of control and on the rise.
“You can’t cross the street to buy a piece of bread. You get shot, you get robbed, you get molested,” the former president said at a recent campaign event north of Detroit.
But several years of national data tell a counter story: Crime is falling in US cities and townsnited States. NBC News recently spent a day with Detroit police, and they say the portrayal of Trump is false.
“This is simply not true,” said Detroit Police Chief James White. “I invite him to walk the streets of Detroit and I would be more than happy to do that with him and show him how Detroit performs.”
Detroit has seen a sharp decline in homicides, shootings and other violent crimes in recent years, according to city, state and federal statistics. After rising during the pandemic, violent crime rates have fallen back to where they were in 2019, the figures show — sharply lower than 10 and 20 years ago. Detroit had 252 homicides last year, the lowest number since 1966.
Over the decades, homicides have declined dramatically across the country. New York had 386 homicides last year, down from 2,605 in 1990, according to the New York Police Department.
FBI crime statistics show violent crime in the U.S. has declined over the past two years, and other data show continued declines in the first half of this year. Last month, new FBI figures showed that homicides fell 11.6% in 2023, a record one-year decline.
“I don’t think there’s a leader in America who tells you, we can all go home now, crime is over in our communities,” White said. “But when we compare where we are today, where we were yesterday, and where we were last year, and certainly where we were during the pandemic, we’ve reduced crime in the city of Detroit.”
Detroit has long been on the list of America’s most crime-ridden major cities, and it still is, based on the amount of violence. But non-fatal shootings fell 18% last year, and car thefts fell by a third, according to the city.
Detroit has taken a number of unique steps, including making it easier for police to prevent crime Installation of cameras at more than 1000 gas stations and other businesses in high-crime neighborhoods. The cameras are monitored by officers watching the screens of the headquarters’ nerve center in the city center.
But across America, pandemic crime rates are declining.
FBI data released last month showed that violent crime declined nationally for the second year in a row in 2023, and other crime statistics support that conclusion. Department of Justice to learn One of 88 cities reported a 16.9% drop in homicides in the first half of this year, another record decline rate.
Again, polls show an overwhelming majority of Americans – 77%, according to a recent measure – believe crime is still on the rise.
Criminologists say local news and social media reinforce this misconception. But Trump and his allies have also focused on statistics and falsely told supporters that FBI crime data cannot be trusted.
During the presidential debates in September, Trump said: “They were cheating on the statements. “They don’t include cities with the worst crime. It was a fraud.”
That’s wrong: The FBI’s latest annual numbers covered 94% of the US population, including every city with a million-plus population.
Trump and others trying to cast doubt on the data have taken advantage of the fact that measuring crime is a complex, imprecise science and that not every source of data is consistent.
Complicating the picture, the FBI changed the way it collects crime data from cities during the Trump administration, and several major cities were not included in the annual figures for 2021 when the change was implemented.
But until 2022, the FBI solved the data release problem by allowing cities struggling to transition to the new system to submit plates with the old system.
Crime data skeptics also attribute the drop in crime to “waking up prosecutors” who don’t prosecute. That’s also wrong: The FBI’s crime data is based on crimes reported to the police — it has nothing to do with whether or not those crimes are prosecuted.
Skeptics also point to the Justice Department’s annual crime victimization survey, which, unlike FBI data, tries to count both reported and unreported crimes by interviewing people in person and asking if they’ve been a victim in the past six months.
In contrast to FBI data that found crime down, the most recent victim survey showed violent crime was flat in 2023 compared to 2022.
During the pandemic, the victim survey in 2020 and 2021 showed a strange result that contradicted the FBI’s data – it found that the rates of violent crimes decreased. The FBI found that violent crime increased during those two years, and homicides not measured by the victim survey rose sharply, but then declined in subsequent years.
Some experts say the victim survey results for those years may be suspect because they don’t reflect the increases seen in FBI data. But Trump is using these low 2020 and 2021 victim survey numbers to claim, despite skepticism, that violent crime increased significantly during the Biden-Harris administration.
Trump and his allies have found that overall crime rates have fallen back to the historically low levels they reached in 2019, according to victim survey data from the FBI.
“Findings show an overall decline in violent victimization rates over the past three decades, from 1993 to 2023,” said Kevin Scott, acting director of the Bureau of Justice Statistics, in a statement. It is not statistically different from the indicator of 5 years ago, in 2019.”
Jeff Asher is a former CIA analyst who studies crime data and recently launched the Real-Time Crime Index, a web tool that will aggregate monthly crime data from 500 to 1,000 local police departments to visualize nationwide crime trends.
“The violent crime rate was about even in 2023 compared to 2019 and will be lower in 2024,” he told NBC News.
According to its index, homicides in 277 major cities are down 16.7% so far this year compared to last year.
University of Miami criminologist Alex Piquero says Asher’s index is one of five reliable sources of crime data, including victim surveys, FBI numbers, the University of Chicago’s live crime tracker and the Association of Major Cities (Police) Chiefs. All point to crime returning to pre-pandemic levels.
“They all tell the same story,” he said. “Crime is down.”
But US residents still face higher levels of gun violence than any other country in the industrialized world. And for the families whose lives have been upended by this violence, the statistics are meaningless.
Jordan Thornhill, who grew up in a leafy suburb north of Detroit, had recently graduated from Michigan State and was in town for a July 5 neighborhood party. He was on the phone with his brother when gunshots rang out and he fell silent. His brother later found his body. Police are investigating whether he was shot during the party.
“I lost my son. Why? Why did it happen?” a tearful Venecca Thornhill told NBC News with her husband, Andre Thornhill. “Jordan was supposed to be able to come home with his brother that night, but he didn’t.”
Andre Thornhill said he understands crime is down. It doesn’t make his pain any less acute.
“We are now part of a club that we didn’t sign up for, but now we have to accept it, we have to accept it,” he said, “and we have tried to build friendships with the family members of the other victims, to help them. They are a little supportive and they are trying to give us a little support.” .
The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) has announced a $25,000 reward for information that will help the agency solve the murder of Jordan Thornhill.
“It’s heartbreaking,” Police Chief White said. “What happened to Jordan Thornhill is tragic and Jordan Thornhill represents every kid in town, right? This is a kid who does what you want a kid to do. Graduated from Michigan State University. His parents are people who love and support a real, beautiful American family in our city.”
He added: “We’re going to continue to expand what we do, but we’re not going to pat ourselves on the back and tear our rotator cuff. Our city has a lot of crime, a lot of violent crime, and we have a lot of people using guns to settle relatively simple disputes.”