Serious crime skyrocketed between the mid-1960s and the mid-1990s. As I note here, why this happened requires a long and complex analysis. However, what brought down crime after the mid-1990s is not a complicated story: it was a drastic expansion of the criminal justice system—incarcerating more violent offenders for longer periods of time and putting more police on the street focused on crime prevention, drug trafficking, and gang activity. However, over the last decades, police departments have been stood down and prosecutors installed who routinely decline to hold perpetrators responsible for their crimes.
We’ve been told by the Harris-Walz campaign, the corporate media, and progressive social media influencers that violent crime is down under Biden-Harris. We saw a few weeks ago that, according to a report by the Department of Justice, violent crime isn’t down. It’s up. The DOJ’s Criminal Victimization, 2023 found that, according to the National Crime Victimization Survey, or NCVS, from 2020 to 2023, violent crime increased 37 percent, rape 42 percent, robbery 63 percent, and stranger violence 61 percent. Also in the DOJ report, property crime was up 13 percent, driven by motor vehicle theft, which increased 48 percent.
Now the FBI has finally updated its Crime Data Explorer, or CDE. What do those data show? As with the NCVS, violent crime isn’t down. It’s up. The above chart depicts over a decade of data. The FBI doesn’t make it easy to eyeball, failing to provide dates along the x-axis, but we can count dots. Look at seventh dot. That’s September 2020. Trump is President. Violent crime is down. The eighth dot is September 2021. Biden is president. Violent crime is up.
However, there’s something missing the reports. A couple of things, actually. As readers of Freedom and Reason know, blacks are overrepresented in violent and serious crime statistics. For years, the percentage of blacks who perpetrate homicide and robbery has consistently exceeded fifty percent (some years approaching sixty percent for robbery) despite blacks being only around thirteen percent of the population. Most violent and serious crime is perpetrated by young males. Young black males comprise approximately 4-5 percent of the population. This means the overrepresentation of blacks in crime is even more significant than it might appear at first.
Statistics for the nation as a whole show that blacks (mostly male) perpetrate half of all robberies, while forty-six percent of all victims are white. However, “Not Specified” and “Unknown” attributes enjoy much larger percentages than in years previous. Given that, in 2022, fifty-eight percent of offenders were black, one might guess with a reasonable degree of certainty what percentage of “not specifics” and “unknowns” might be included in specified and known categories. Indeed, it may be worse than it was before.
Here is the data for New York State and New York City respectively. A lot of “unknowns.” (This is especially odd for the victim race category.)
Here are the racial demographics for homicide in New York City. Sixty-eight percent “unknown.”
Here’s robbery for Chicago. A lot of “unknowns.”
A lot of “not specified” for murder in Chicago:
What’s going in Baltimore? Sixty-four percent “not specified.”
Here’s Atlanta. Fifty-nine percent of robbers are black. Twenty-one percent “unknown.” Nineteen percent “not specified.”
Here the second thing that’s missing. I wanted to show you New Orleans, but the demographic data—age, sex, race, ethnicity—are all blank. That means that the New Orleans Police Department reported no data for violent crime. Here are the CDE charts for homicide and robbery. Note the totals. Nothing but zeros.
I wanted to show you Los Angeles, too, but there is no demographic data reported for LA, either. Or Jackson, Mississippi. Does crime go down when you don’t report it? Absolutely.
Birmingham, Alabama did report demographics with relative few “not specifieds” and “unknowns.” Eighty-six percent of robbers are black.
Birmingham Police reported numbers for homicides, as well. Look at the number of “unknowns” in the offender category. Now look at the victim race category.
It is pretty clear why officials have been keeping the data away from the public and why the media conveys a different impression the what the facts indicate—and what our common sense tells us. The media hasn’t bothered to tell the public that the data reported to the FBI first depends on crime victims reporting crimes to the police, then on police departments reporting those numbers to the FBI. The NCVS finds that, for most serious crimes, less than half of the crime that victims report in surveys are reported to the police. What the CDE report tells us is that some of the biggest police departments in the most crime ridden blue cities aren’t even reporting these numbers.
The supposed drop in crime is a mirage. The media knows this. If that institution were to function the way it was supposed to, it would be reporting to you what I am reporting to you. But the media the propaganda apparatus for the corporate state, captured by progressive ideology, and they are covering for the blue cities. We call them “blue cities” because they’re run by Democrats. Democrats created and maintain the conditions that generate violent crime. They are also hiding or obscuring racial demographics. This is because the primary victims of progressive policy is black people. Progressives only chant “Black Lives Matter.” They don’t actually believe it. They never have. After all, what has the Democratic Party represented since its inception?
People stopped paying attention to the conditions of blue cities for many years because of the historic drop in crime. Since crime has been on the rise, the result of depolicing and reluctant prosecutors, the ubiquitous preachments of identity politics, and the effects of globalization, including mass immigration, an increasing number of people have taken notice. Since Democrats can’t turn this around before the election, they have taken to hiding the numbers. The media is all too eager to help. And if Democrats win the election, they won’t turn this around for the same reasons they caused this to happen. And the media will continue to cover for them.
freedom and reason 