Last fall, Bronwen McShea, who lives near the upscale Manhattan neighborhood of Gramercy Park, found a vagrant in the vestibule of her building. She couldn’t get past him to the lobby and when she asked him to leave, he launched into a barrage of curses and threats.
McShea reached for her phone to capture the incident, but this only made the situation worse. The man grabbed a nearby broom and smashed the glass door. A shard of glass flew into her mouth.
After several failed attempts to force his way through the broken door, he left and McShea called the police. The police response left her feeling more disturbed than the attack itself.
“What shook me even more than what I had just experienced was how nonchalant the cops were,” she told me. “There was no follow-up from the cops. As far as I know, the man was never found.”
“The city doesn’t feel safe and I think that most people in New York would share that assessment.”
Indeed, most Americans believe that crime is getting worse, a theme that has been central to former president Donald Trump’s campaign and remains a key election issue. Trump channeled public perception at a September campaign event when he said, “You don’t have to know anything about numbers. If you live in this country, you know crime has gone up.”
Vice President Kamala Harris has talked about how violent crime is at a 50-year low, a statement that, while largely accurate, came back to haunt her when the FBI recently updated its stats for 2022 and showed an increase over the previous year rather than a decrease.
What’s the truth about crime in America? Are things worse? Or better? In a highly polarized election year, the answer is often: What do you want it to be?
The freedom for candidates and others to define their own perception of crime is due in part to how it’s measured. For instance, there are two official sources of national crime data. One is the FBI’s Uniform Crime Reporting Program, which aggregates data provided by police departments. The second is the Bureau of Justice Statistics’ National Crime Victimization Survey, a poll that asks people about their experience of all crimes, including those that weren’t reported to police.
Both systems have their flaws. In 2021, the FBI changed its reporting system to get more detail. (For instance, under the old system, if someone was robbed and murdered, that showed up as one incident, whereas under the new system, it’s reported as two separate crimes.) The switch to the new reporting system created confusion as many police departments weren’t initially equipped for the change, and it raised questions about the reliability of the data.
The victimization survey also has its weaknesses. The most obvious is that it doesn’t cover murder—because the victims can’t respond to a survey!
“We don’t have a crime data reporting system that’s 100 percent reliable. The quality of the data itself is lacking,” Jeff Asher, a well-known crime data analyst and co-founder of data analytics firm AH Datalytics, told me.
Room for interpretation grows when the two methods diverge. According to the latest data, for instance, the victims’ survey reports that in 2023, “violent victimizations” were 22.5 per 1,000 of the population aged 12 and up, unchanged from the previous year.
The FBI crime report, on the other hand, said that murder was down by 11.6 percent in 2023, the largest year-over-year drop since these statistics have been compiled, and violent crime in general is down by 3 percent.
When the FBI recently revised its crime data from 2022 without explanation, original data stating that violent crime had fallen by 2.1 percent was corrected to show a 4.5 percent increase. And there was no mention of this change in the FBI’s September 2024 press release.
“I don’t know why the estimates were revised so much. The secrecy is frustrating,” Asher told me. “But that doesn’t make it nefarious.”
Others disagree.
Steve Friend is a former FBI agent who worked in anti-terrorism and combating child pornography. He later turned whistleblower, testifying before the House Judiciary Committee that the FBI has become politicized and weaponized against conservatives. The FBI stripped him of his security clearance, and he’s been indefinitely suspended.
“Data isn’t supposed to be political. . . . They have become talking points for people running for high office rather than something that’s supposed to be factual to inform decisions and policymaking,” Friend told me.
Whether the FBI is right or its critics are, it’s clear that public perception has turned against the bureau. A June 2023 NBC News survey found that just 37 percent of registered voters had a positive view of the FBI. That’s down from 52 percent in 2018.
The souring of the public’s view of the FBI is happening at the same time that many Americans say that crime is pervasive—even though both FBI data and the national victims’ survey both show that crime has declined significantly since the early ’90s.
“I don’t trust these numbers, because I don’t trust that all crime is being prosecuted or registered, because I think there is a lot of underreporting,” Gramercy Park resident McShea told me.
A new Gallup poll released Tuesday found that 56 percent of Americans believe that the crime problem is “extremely” or “very serious,” down from 63 percent the previous year. It’s the first time the number has dropped since 2020. The change is almost entirely due to improved attitudes among Democrats. Ninety percent of Republicans believe there is more crime now than there was a year ago.
Asher, the crime data analyst, said the public usually has it wrong.
“I think people are bad at judging crime data. There are long delays between when incidents occur, when crime data is collected, and when official figures are reported,” he said. “This data vacuum causes people to use anecdotes to evaluate trends.”
Lisa Miller, a professor of political science at Rutgers University whose research focuses on violent crime and criminal justice, said most people are not looking at marginal changes in the rates of violence from year to year. But, she said, they have a “pretty good grasp of the fact that the U.S. can be a dangerous and violent place, more than other countries in the West.”
Because methodologies differ on what counts as violent crime in different countries, Miller says that homicide, which has a similar definition across countries and is difficult to hide, is a better comparative measure than violent crime in general.
As Miller notes, homicide “rates in the U.S. are typically two to three times higher than in Canada, four to five times higher than in Britain, and at the peak of the U.S. homicide rate (1980s and ’90s), as much as ten times higher than in Denmark and the Netherlands.”
A focus on homicide could skew public perception toward thinking that all crime is higher than it is. But that’s cold comfort for many Americans worried about violence in their neighborhoods.
Hannah Meyers, director of policing and public safety at the Manhattan Institute think tank, said that focusing on crime statistics alone leaves out “a huge increase in disorder, which tangibly changes people’s experience of their own safety walking around, riding subways, and commuting at night.”
In addition, many low-level crimes are simply not prosecuted, Meyers points out. While they may show up in the crime statistics, the fact that the perpetrators of such criminal acts often face no consequences increases people’s fear of crime.
For McShea, living in Manhattan feels like running the gauntlet every day.
“I feel like at any moment, New York could descend into anarchy. There is a smell of decay and disorder. And it was not like that in the past.”
Rupa Subramanya is a reporter for The Free Press. Follow her on X @RupaSubramanya and read her piece “The Debanking of America.”
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