The agency’s process is shrouded in mystery, and its numbers are often inconsistent.
The mainstream media has recently trumpeted the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s estimate that violent crime fell 3 percent nationally from 2022 to 2023. They have largely ignored, however, the latest iteration of the Bureau of Justice Statistics’ National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS), which found a 9 percent increase in property crime in urban areas over that span—part of a 26 percent rise in urban property crime, alongside a whopping 40 percent surge in urban violent crime, from 2019 to 2023.
Set aside, for a moment, the media’s downplaying of BJS’s inconvenient urban-crime data. Are the FBI’s statistics really precise enough to make much of a reported 3 percent annual change in violent crime?
