Letter Submitted to the Washington Post: Responding to the Misleading Editorial Titled: “Crime rates are improving. Too bad crime data is not,” July 28, 2024

Dr. Lott submitted this letter to the Washington Post, but it wasn’t published.

Dear Editor:

Your editorial leaves readers with the mistaken impression that crime has fallen (“Crime rates are improving. Too bad crime data is not,” July 28, 2024).  Unlike the National Incident-Based Reporting System (NIBRS), which only looks at reported crime, the National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS) showed that total (reported and unreported) violent crime rose by 42% in 2022 (the most recent year for the NCVS data). 

As arrest rates have plummeted since 2020, not as many people are reporting crime. Nonreported violent crime in 2022 exceeded the five-year average between 2015 and 2019 by more than 17%. 

While your editorial correctly states that many police departments aren’t reporting crime data to the FBI’s NIBRS, it is worse than you say. In 2022, almost a third of departments didn’t report data, but another 24% only engaged in partial reporting. So, less than half of departments fully reported crime data. This is only one reason why the NIBRS measure of reported crime has fallen while the NCVS measure of total crime has risen.

Sincerely,

John R. Lott, Jr., Ph.D.
President
Crime Prevention Research Center