The news media focuses on the FBI data to show that murders are falling. We have previously reported the problems with the FBI violent and property compared to the National Crime Victimization Survey data (here and here). But it turns out that the FBI murder data also differs from the CDC homicide data. While the media focuses on how the FBI data shows a 6.6% drop in murders from 2020 to 2022, the CDC shows a slight 0.5% increase. Compared to the five pre-2020 COVID years, the FBI shows a 20.8% increase by 2022 compared to a 27.9% increase for the CDC. These are significant differences, particularly since the CDC data makes it difficult for the news media to claim that at least through 2022 that homicides are declining.
The FBI data shows the peak in 2020, with drops in 2021 and 2022, while the CDC shows the peak in 2021, with 2022 still higher than the year (2020) that the FBI claims was the peak.
There are number of possible problems with both sources. The FBI faced a large number of police departments stopping reporting data in 2021, though the annual final data was pretty much back to normal by 2022. There are other questions regarding whether the FBI has been accurately reporting the data that police departments have given them. The CDC data depends on medical examiner report so they are considered more accurate final counts.
In order to get the CDC data close to the murder rate, we subtract homicides involving killings by police.
The preliminary FBI data is available for 2023, with the murder rate is down to 5.51, continuing the drop that the FBI data indicates for 2021 and 2022, it is still 7% above their measure of murder in 2019. But we are going to compare the data up to 2022, as the latest CDC data is available for 2022.
The CDC data may overstate homicides because families can lobby medical examiners to list suicides as homicides.
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