As concerns grow around surging violent crime, the numbers tell a different story

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• Geoff Bennett:

  There's been a good deal of attention recently on violent crimes in the U.S., especially in many big cities and metro areas.

  But data suggests the reality may be different from the past few years and different than the perception of how safe many people feel in their communities.

  Stephanie Sy has our update.

• Stephanie Sy:

  Geoff, several headlines recently have put a spotlight on murders and violent crime. That includes the death of Laken Riley, a 22-year-old nursing student in Georgia who was allegedly killed by a Venezuelan immigrant who entered the U.S. illegally.

  Her murder was front and center during last week's State of the Union. And, in New York, Governor Kathy Hochul recently began deploying the National Guard to patrol the New York City subway. Homicides did surge in a number of places, including rural areas, during the pandemic. But recent data points to an overall drop in killings from 2022 to 2023.

  For a closer look at what the data tells us about crime in the U.S., I'm joined by Jeff Asher, a crime analyst and co-founder of AH Datalytics.

  Jeff, thank you so much for joining the "NewsHour."

  I realize that every city has a different level of crime, but is it possible to make a broad assessment of where violent crime is overall right now, compared to, say, five years ago? And I'm not just talking about homicides, but also crimes like rape, assaults and carjacking.

• Jeff Asher, Crime Analyst:

  So, it's a lot easier to do with homicide and murder than it is for other violent crimes.

  For the most part, violent crime has been largely steady for the last 10 to 15 or so years. It's something that, in the pandemic, violent crime kind of fell. It rose a little bit and fell a little bit, because a lot of violent crime is reliant on people being out and about.

  And so, if people aren't out and walking around, it's harder to do random robberies. You see things like aggravated assaults fall. Murder makes up about 0.2 percent of all major crimes, as counted by the FBI, and has a — is a completely different set of rules behind it. It has a much easier time of tracking it, and agencies report it a lot more often.

  So we're able to see, with a lot more confidence, that murder surged enormously in 2020, seems to have stayed about that level, maybe rose a little bit in 2021, and then fell in 2022. And all of the data that we have available to us shows that there was a sizable decline in 2023.

• Stephanie Sy:

  Can you say in which places violent crime or murders has not dropped and maybe even gotten worse?

• Jeff Asher:

  So there are certainly outliers. Any time you're going to have 75 or 80 percent of the nation's big cities go one way, there's going to be 15 to 20 percent of the nation's big cities going the other way.

  And, certainly, places like Washington, D.C., Memphis, even Seattle have seen large increases in murder, and haven't necessarily seen the decreases, although, in 2024, especially in D.C., the early evidence suggests that we may be in for a decline in 2024, though it's too early in the year to say quite for sure, with respect to D.C., at least.

• Stephanie Sy:

  With what you're saying, it doesn't sound like most places are going through a violent crime wave.

  What about nonviolent crimes, for example, car thefts, which are reportedly surging in San Francisco and other property crimes?

• Jeff Asher:

  So, nationally, the long-term trend has been sharply declining property crime for most of the last 25 or 30 years. That continued and accelerated through the pandemic.

  Again, if nobody's shopping, nobody's going to be shoplifting. In 2022, there was a bit of a rebound. And then, in 2023, there was a — probably, overall, property crime fell, but auto theft surged. And you saw this because of posts on TikTok that showed certain models of certain cars are easier to steal and showed people essentially how to steal them, led to these enormous surges in auto thefts in a lot of cities.

  Not everywhere. It seems like it was more of a big city issue than small town or rural county. But you saw places that had just kind of overnight doubling of auto thefts or tripling of auto thefts. And it's very rare for a crime trend, one, to have such an obvious cause and, two, to just have a switch turn on and to see this enormous increase in or decrease in that type of crime.

• Stephanie Sy:

  Jeff, a Gallup poll from late last year shows 63 percent of adults see the U.S. crime problem as very or extremely serious.

  So, broadly speaking, do you see a disconnect between how people perceive crime levels and what you found in the data?

• Jeff Asher:

  So, I would never say that people should not be concerned or find the number of crimes, the level of crime necessarily to not be troubling or something that we shouldn't be striving to decrease.

  I think, with that Gallup poll, what's more concerning to me is that 77 percent of Americans think that crime rose in the last year. And all of the evidence that we have show that murder declined, and declined significantly, possibly the largest one-year decline ever.

  The preliminary data shows that violent crime and property crime likely fell. And so I think the real issue here is that we have created a situation where people either think crime is on the rise because the data shows it, or crime is on the rise, but the data must be wrong, the data that's showing it's declining.

  And so I think that if we want to have effective policy solutions and effective response to crime, we have to be in a position to acknowledge when it's going down. And I think that that requires people to have some level of trust and understanding in the data and be willing to approach the question honestly, because all we want to — we all want to see crime and gun violence declining nationally.

  It's a question of, what does the data show and how can we continue those trends?

• Stephanie Sy:

  Jeff Asher with AH Datalytics, thanks for joining the "NewsHour."

• Jeff Asher:

  Thanks for having me.

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