Have Democrat-Run Cities Given Up On Reporting Crime?

Even though gangs are increasingly targeting gun-toting, carjacking, and mugging people in major cities, 100,000 Americans die from fentanyl poisoning every year. Mass murders happen with alarming regularity. Unfortunately, partisanship can have a significant impact on perceptions of crime. Gallup research Republicans perceive crime more as a problem when a Democrat is President, and vice versa when a Republican is elected to the White House. 

National discussions about public safety are plagued by competing narratives and insufficient information. It’s difficult to come up with a consensus political solution. Even as Gallup’s polling This belief is evident in “crime is increasing locally is now at the highest point,” It notes: “In absolute terms, Americans have for decades exhibited a marked tendency to say that crime is increasing rather than decreasing, year in and year out.”

It’s difficult enough that public perception of crime is often untethered from reality, it’s even worse when the government agencies that are supposed to report, gather, and analyze crime are failing at an alarming rate. 

Nonprofit that advocates left-leaning criminal law The Marshall Project, in commenting on the FBI’s annual release of crime statistics last November, noted, “The nation’s most thorough crime data collection program concluded it’s possible crime went up, went down or stayed the same.” Why all the uncertainty? It “largely stems from the fact that 2021’s data was more incomplete than any in recent memory. … This year about 7,000 police agencies, covering about 35% of the U.S. population were missing.” The Justice Department just made an estimate in order to fix the large gaps in the data for large cities such New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco. 

“In some cases,” Marshall observed, “the FBI didn’t even have enough information to make an estimation.”

Why is there so much missing data about arrests? There are two reasons. The FBI finally switched over fully to a new reporting method, the National Incident-Based Reporting System. The FBI had been accepting data in a format that was nearly 100 years old, and 2021 was the first year the reports from police departments — entirely voluntary — had to be in the new format. But there’s another disturbing reason some police departments don’t report data: It could make them or the left-wing politicians overseeing them look bad. 

The FBI didn’t publish state-level violent crime statistics for California, Florida and Hawaii, Illinois, Maryland. New Jersey, New Mexico, Pennsylvania, and New Mexico. The entire West region did not have an estimate for violent crimes, murders and aggravated attacks. Thus, when some, mostly on the left, argue that crime is going down, it’s a highly suspect claim. 

I asked Julie WarrenMy Texas Public Policy Foundation colleague and deputy director, Jeremy, is my colleague. Right on Crime initiative about police departments’ persistent non-reporting crime data. She said that a non-reporting department, such as the San Francisco Police Department, could be dissuaded from reporting arrests because the district attorney refuses to press charges on most arrestees, resulting in a dismal closure rate for the department — 100 suspects arrested, three charged, one convicted. 

Until he was recalled in a July 8, 2022, election, San Francisco’s DA was Soros-backed radical leftist Chesa Boudin. It is easy to imagine that the San Francisco PD would simply throw in the towel on any of the most egregious crimes committed in the City by The Bay. 

Soros DAs also run many other major prosecutorial offices. Los Angeles, Chicago and Philadelphia are all affected. New York, Baltimore and Albuquerque are all in danger. Three urban counties in Northern Virginia have seen an increase in crime because DAs allow the accused to walk quickly. 

Unsurprisingly, there’s a big overlap between entities that don’t report crime statistics to the FBI and Soros prosecutors — no report, no crime. 

Yet, even with the incomplete 2021 FBI crime statistics showing what appears to be little change in crime rates from 2020 — murder up 4 percent, overall violent crime down 1 percent — only half of violent crimes are even reported. In addition to the FBI’s arrest database, since 1973, the Justice Department runs a separate crime victimization survey. This lesser-known measure consistently shows higher rates of violent crimes than what law enforcement agencies report back to the FBI. 

Warren was kind enough to answer my questions. She pointed out that victims of crime who live in high risk communities with liberal DAs and basic cash bail policies have strong incentives to not report the crime. Should they report the local gang member who robbed their shop or mugged them, the gang member, if arrested, will quickly make bail — being in a gang means having friends who will bail you out — and who will then come looking to exact revenge. Domestic violence victims may be subject to the same fate as domestic violence victims. Abusive boyfriends might come back to beat or worsen them. 

Risk assessments could be used to address this issue. Two factors are considered in risk assessments: whether the defendant will be present at trial, and what public safety risk the defendant presents to the community. The bail bond industry and the left are almost unanimously against risk assessments in bail. They claim they are biased racially. Some risk assessments may be a black box that uses racial scoring but there are many open-source risk assessment tools that don’t use ethnicity or race. 

Before a DA can decide to press charges, and before someone charged with a crime can make bail, they have to be arrested — or, even better, deterred from committing a crime in the first place. Unfortunately, “Defund the Police” Movement has led to a reduction in resources for police in certain cities, while also disengaging officers from patrolling high-crime areas. 

Ja’Ron Smith, a former special assistant to President Trump for domestic policy who now leads Public Safety Solutions for AmericaThe Coalition for the Prevention of Violent Crime (CPT) stated:

It’s important to have the best data available so we can make educated decisions on how to best solve for violent crime. The problem of crime is not a regional one. Studies show that violent crime is highly concentrated amongst a very small network of people within each city, so we need to leverage data to create evidence-based policy solutions to make communities safer, rather than playing politics with people’s lives.

Seattle, Washington has been at forefront of anti-police policy. 525 Seattle Police Department officers have resigned or retired since 2020. It is now becoming more difficult to find qualified candidates. In 2022, violent crime was at its highest level in 15 years.. In 2022, murders increased 24 percent compared to the previous year. Motor vehicle theft increased by 30%, and almost 70% of vehicles were never recovered. Last June, the city police’s sexual assault unit was so short of staff It has stopped accepting new cases of sexual assault. 

Is it possible that the National Guard will be deployed by governors to assist overwhelmed law enforcement departments in the event of a continued collapse in local policing in Seattle and other major cities across the country?