The good news about crimes

You don't hear many good news these days and you hear even less good news about crimes. In fact, this is a consistent structural problem with reporting on crime. When the crime increases, a lot of attention is attracted – and follows the old saying “If it bleeds, it leads.”

Most news consumers are probably aware that the United States experienced one of the most remarkable increase in crime in their history from 2020. The murder rose for the highest annual rate from 2019 to 2020 (until the beginning of the reliable records). Some supporters of criminal police officers who feared that the increase was doing the rise of the occurrence to fail to fail. They were right to have the violent crime still far below the worst peaks of the 1980s and 90s, but wrongly to reject the increase in fully. Such a steeper, consistent and national ascent is scary, and each data point is a horror for real people.

What happened afterwards is less announced: the crime has been low since then. Although the final statistics are not yet available, some experts believe that 2024 will probably set the record for the steepest fall In the murder rate. And 2025 has an even better start. The year is not halfway over and it can still change what is it in 2020 when the murder was really preceded in the second half, but the real-time crime index, which is based on a national sample, states that the murder has decreased by 21.6 percent that violent crimes have dropped by 11 percent, and the crime of property was 13.8 percent. Chicago had 20 murders in April. This is not only lower than in an April of the past few years – that is the best April since 1962, at the beginning of Richard J. Daley's mayor.

One of the major challenges in reporting on crime is the lack and delay of good statistics. The best figures come from the FBI, but they will only be published in the autumn of the following year. Nevertheless, we can get a pretty good idea of ​​the trends from the available data. The Council for Criminal Justice analyzed data from 40 cities in 13 categories of crime in 2024 and found that everyone decreased from 2023 except for one (shop theft). The decline in murder in the cities in the sample, in which data reported, and in the cities with a particularly high number of murders such as St. Louis, Baltimore and Detroit, they dropped at the levels of 2014. Even Carjacking, which had suddenly become more common in recent years, had been higher-the theft of the engine vehicle was higher.

A separate report by the Major Cities Chiefs Association, which gathered the police authorities in the largest cities, showed similar trends: a decline in the Morts by 16 percent compared to 2023 and a lower reduction in rape, robbery and serious bodily harm.

Another major challenge to report on crime is how vague our understanding is what changes in crime. Even now, the scientists do not agree, which led to the long decline in crime from the 1990s to the 2010s. A popular theory for the rise of 2020 was that it was associated with the murder of George Floyd and the resulting protests, which, however, allows several possible ways: Were the police too occupied with protests to deal with ordinary crimes? Did you as a kind of protest (the “blue flu”) disappointed-did you withdraw because that was the message that the protests sent you and your leaders? Did the police delegitimize the brutal law enforcement authorities in the eyes of the citizens and promote an increase in criminal behavior? In various proportions, each or all of them are possible.

In a report by Brookings Institution published in December, it shows that the pandemic itself is the main culprit. The authors argue that the murder already rose when Floyd was killed. “The increase in murders in 2020 was directly associated with local unemployment and school closings in areas with low incomes,” they write. “Cities with a larger number of young men who were forced from work, and young boys who gathered from school in the districts in the districts in the districts in March and early April had an average murder representative from May to December.” Since many of these unemployment and school class trends have been continued for years, they believe that this explains why high murse rates were stopped before falling in 2021 and 2022. The journalist Alec Macgillis also made powerful reporting that present a similar argument.

The recognition of the real trends in the crime rates is sometimes important because the disorder that opens up real or perceived disorders is opened for demagoguery. During his time in politics, President Donald Trump exaggerated the state of crime in the United States and used it to urge both stricter and more brutal police work. He has also argued that deportations will reduce crime – with his government, which deletes a website of the Ministry of Justice with a report in which it is found that undocumented immigrants commit crime to lower citizens in Texas.

The irony is that Trump's political decisions can slow down or even reverse the positive trends that are currently being performed. Reuters reports that the Ministry of Justice has eliminated more than 800 million US dollars in grants via the Office of Justice programs. Giffords, a group of weapons control founded by the former US representative Gabby Giffords, warns that this includes important aid to the local police authorities to prevent weapons and other forms of crime: “Trump destabilizes the basis of the programs to prevent violence throughout the country.” The administration's economic policy also threatens to drive the United States into a recession that leads to the crime, as may have been done in 2020.

Increase in crime, which are driven by misguided political decisions, would be tragic, especially if the shock of 2020 fades. Good news is not only difficult to find – it can also be fleeting.

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Stephanie Bai contributed to this newsletter.

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