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In a campaign rally in Atlanta and other venues, former President Donald Trump has tried to paint Vice President Kamala Harris, a former California attorney general and San Francisco district attorney, as being soft on crime. Several of his claims go beyond the facts or distort her positions.
- Trump falsely said that Harris supports “mass amnesty and citizenship” for “all illegals … even criminals.” The Trump campaign pointed to past proposals that Harris has supported, but none would have done that.
- He wrongly claimed that there was “no crime” if someone stole less than $1,000 worth of goods, and he was wrong again in saying that Harris “started” such a policy. In California, it’s a felony if someone shoplifts more than $950 worth of goods, but it’s a misdemeanor for values below that.
- In discussing crimes committed by immigrants living in the U.S. illegally, Trump falsely claimed that Harris, when she was the San Francisco DA, “wouldn’t arrest murderers. She wouldn’t arrest anybody.”
- Trump claimed that Harris “supports mandatory gun confiscation” that would leave Americans “defenseless in your house.” Harris hasn’t called for confiscating all guns, and her campaign said she no longer supports the mandatory buyback program for “assault weapons” that she called for during her last presidential campaign.
- He claimed that Harris “urged her followers to donate to bail rapists and murderers out of jail” and said “that the violent mobs should not stop.” In June 2020, Harris asked for donations to a bail fund to help people protesting against police brutality, not rapists and murderers. She also said that “protests,” not riots, are “not going to stop” and “should not” stop.
- Trump said Harris “supports abolishing cash bail, which means bloodthirsty criminals that just killed somebody can immediately leave custody, go out and kill somebody else.” But ending money bail does not mean accused murderers would automatically be released from jail before trial.
- He distorted the facts in claiming that Harris, as California attorney general, “defined and redefined child sex trafficking, assault with a deadly weapon, and rape of a unconscious person … as nonviolent.” A 2016 ballot referendum used the term “nonviolent felonies” without defining them, while the state penal code only specifies 23 crimes as a “violent felony.”
- Violent crime and murders nationwide have gone down during the Biden/Harris administration, according to FBI and other crime data. But Trump has taken to citing a different set of data to claim “there’s been a 43% increase in violent crimes since I left office.”
Comprehensive Immigration Reform
In Atlanta on Aug. 3, Trump wrongly claimed that Harris supports “mass amnesty and citizenship” for “all illegals … even criminals.”
Trump, Aug. 3: And the main thing, think of this, she wants to let mass amnesty and citizenship, she wants all illegals to have mass amnesty. Everybody, even criminals.
The Trump campaign referred us to past proposals that Harris has supported, but none of them would have given “mass amnesty and citizenship” to “all illegals,” including criminals.
Specifically, the Trump campaign cited Harris’ support in 2015 as California attorney general for then-President Barack Obama’s Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program. DACA defers deportation proceedings for two years, subject to renewal, for qualified individuals — known as Dreamers — who were brought to the U.S. illegally prior to 2007 when they were children.
But these so-called Dreamers are a sliver of the illegal immigrant population, and they are subject to eligibility requirements, including criminal background checks that could result in deportation. As of March 31, there were more than 528,00 active DACA recipients, according to the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services.
As a senator, Harris co-sponsored a bipartisan bill introduced by Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham and Democratic Sen. Dick Durbin — the Dream Act of 2017 — that would have made an estimated 2.14 million eligible for conditional legal status and 1.73 million eligible for lawful permanent residence status, according to the Migration Policy Institute. The bill would have required a criminal background check, among other stipulations. As she did as a presidential candidate in 2019, Harris has continued to support “legislation that creates a path for citizenship” for Dreamers as vice president.
The Trump campaign also cited Harris’ support for comprehensive immigration proposals that would provide permanent legal status or a path to citizenship for more than just Dreamers.
The campaign’s “official war room” account on X recently posted an eight-year-old clip of Harris saying she supports “comprehensive immigration reform.” But supporting “comprehensive immigration reform” isn’t the same as wanting “mass amnesty and citizenship” for “all illegals,” including criminals.
In the video clip circulated by the Trump campaign, Harris is shown speaking on the night that she won her U.S. Senate race in California in 2016. “I intend to fight for a state that has the largest number of immigrants, documented and undocumented, of any state in this country, and do everything we can to bring them justice and dignity and fairness under the law and pass comprehensive immigration reform. Bring them out from under the shadows,” she said.
As a senator, Harris did not introduce or co-sponsor a comprehensive immigration bill, according to Congress.gov, but she supported a comprehensive immigration bill as a candidate for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination.
The Trump campaign also cited Harris’ support for the U.S. Citizenship Act — a comprehensive immigration bill that the Biden-Harris administration sent to Congress in 2021.
The bill — which was introduced in the Senate and House but failed to advance — would have provided a path to citizenship for the 11 million “unauthorized immigrants” that the Department of Homeland Security estimates live in the United States. But certain criminals would be ineligible, and not all eligible immigrants would attain or even seek citizenship. A Pew Research Center study in 2013 found that just 46% of Hispanic immigrants who were eligible to become citizens actually did, for a variety of reasons, such as balking at the English requirement for the citizenship test.
The bill said immigrants had to satisfy “the eligibility requirements set forth in section 245G(b), including all criminal and national security background checks and the payment of all applicable fees.” Section 245G(b) says immigrants are ineligible if they have a felony conviction or three or more misdemeanors. Another section of the bill said that the secretary of Homeland Security shall “determine whether there is any criminal, national security, or other factor that would render the noncitizen ineligible for status under section 245B.”
In its announcement of the bill, the White House said: “The bill allows undocumented individuals to apply for temporary legal status, with the ability to apply for green cards after five years if they pass criminal and national security background checks and pay their taxes.”
Shoplifting
Trump also wrongly claimed at his Atlanta rally that there was “no crime” if someone stole less than $1,000 worth of goods, and he was wrong again in saying that Harris “started” such a policy.
“It used to be that if somebody robbed your store, you would be very tough about it right?” Trump said. “Now, Kamala started this, anything under $1,000, you can do whatever you want. … There’s no crime if it’s less than $1,000. She’s the one who started it.”
He repeated the claim in an Aug. 15 news conference in New Jersey, saying, “You’re allowed to rob a store as long as it’s not more than $950. … They can rob it and not get charged. That was her that did that.”
Trump is referring to a 2014 state law, approved in a referendum by California voters, that reduced the penalties for certain nonviolent property and drug crimes from felonies to misdemeanors. At the time, a 2010 state law had already increased the dollar threshold for a grand theft violation, a felony, from $400 to $950. That meant that thefts of lesser amounts were typically misdemeanors.
The 2014 referendum, called Proposition 47, codified that shoplifting property of $950 or less would always be a misdemeanor, with exceptions for offenders who had prior convictions for certain violent or serious crimes. The measure did not say that thefts under that amount wouldn’t be prosecuted at all. Proposition 47 was proposed at a time of prison overcrowding in California, when the state was under federal court orders to reduce the prison population due to violations of the Constitution’s cruel and unusual punishments clause.
“Prop. 47 created a new category of theft — ‘shoplifting’ (for thefts from retail establishments) — but did not change the dollar threshold” for felony thefts, Michael S. Romano, director of Stanford Law School’s Three Strikes Project and chair of the California Committee on the Revision of the Penal Code, told us in an email.
Harris wasn’t responsible for the 2010 law. That legislation was signed into law by Republican Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger on Sept. 30, 2010. Harris was the state’s attorney general from January 2011 until January 2017. And we couldn’t find any record of Harris taking a position on Proposition 47, which 60% of voters approved in the November 2014 general election.
Romano told us attorneys general usually don’t take positions on ballot referendums. “Kamala Harris had no role in Prop. 47. In California, the Attorney General has responsibility for writing the summary of all propositions that appear on voter ballots. This is a purely ministerial role,” he said. “Given this responsibility, California Attorneys General rarely, if ever, weigh in on ballot measures. Harris certainly did not take any position on Prop. 47.”
Even if she had, the proposition didn’t say there would be “no crime” if the amount of a theft was “less than $1,000,” as Trump claimed.
It’s worth noting that the threshold for charging property theft as a felony varies by state, but many have set the mark at $1,000 or more, at least for first-time offenders, according to a list of such thresholds, updated as of July, provided to us by the National Conference of State Legislatures. There are several conservative states on that list, including Arkansas, Nebraska and Texas.
The Trump campaign acknowledged to us that Harris didn’t take a public position on the referendum, and it wrongly claimed that “her office misled voters by titling Proposition 47 as the innocuous ‘Safe Neighborhoods and Schools Act,'” pointing to a Spectrum News story in which a Republican state assemblymember made that claim. The supporters of the measure are the ones who called it the “Safe Neighborhoods and Schools Act,” as shown on the December 2013 letter the supporters sent to the attorney general’s office, asking that the attorney general “prepare a circulating title and summary” for the initiative to appear on the ballot.
The official title of Prop 47, written by Harris’ office, was: “Criminal Sentences. Misdemeanor Penalties. Initiative Statute.”
Harris’ office was responsible for the 100-word summary of the proposition that also appeared on the ballot. The Trump campaign pointed to a Sacramento Bee editorial in 2015 that took Harris to task for not mentioning in the summary that Prop 47 could lead to a reduction in DNA samples collected from crime scenes, because more crimes would be misdemeanors. Readers can make up their own minds as to whether that should’ve been in the summary.
But, regardless, it doesn’t show that Harris “started” a policy of “no crime” for shoplifting “anything under $1,000,” which was the false claim that Trump made.
Critics of Prop 47 have backed a new referendum, which will be on the ballot in November, to increase the punishment for some of the crimes Prop 47 affected. Shoplifting goods worth $950 or less would still be a misdemeanor for first-time offenders, under the new Prop 36, but it would be a felony “if the person has two or more past convictions for certain theft crimes (such as shoplifting, burglary, or carjacking),” according to a summary posted by the nonpartisan Legislative Analyst’s Office in California.
Harris as San Francisco’s District Attorney
Harris was San Francisco’s district attorney for eight years, from January 2004 until January 2011. The city, for a period of that time, followed a sanctuary city policy that prevented city officials from turning over minors living in the U.S. illegally to Immigration and Customs Enforcement, even if they had been convicted of a felony.
That policy changed in 2008, with Harris’ support, to allow city law enforcement officials to notify ICE when minors were arrested — and not yet convicted — of a felony crime.
In Atlanta, Trump criticized Harris for shielding “illegal alien, crack dealers from deportation,” and falsely claimed that Harris, when she was the city’s DA, “wouldn’t arrest murderers. She wouldn’t arrest anybody.”
When we asked the Trump campaign for evidence that supported the former president’s statements, we were given links to two news articles from 2008. Both articles contradict Trump’s claim that Harris “wouldn’t arrest murderers” and “wouldn’t arrest anyone.”
The news articles were published during a debate in the city over San Francisco’s sanctuary city ordinance, which dates to 1985. The ordinance initially covered only “immigrants seeking asylum from El Salvador and Guatemala,” but was extended in 1989 to include all immigrants, according to a 2011 article in the UC Davis Journal of Juvenile Law & Policy on the city’s policy.
“At that time, San Francisco officials interpreted the ordinance and state juvenile law as preventing them from referring undocumented immigrants in the juvenile justice system to federal authorities for deportation,” the journal article said.
It is that exception for minors that became an issue in 2008 and that Trump referenced in his Atlanta speech.
The Trump campaign sent us a July 1, 2008, story by the San Francisco Chronicle about eight minors from Honduras who were “convicted of dealing drugs.” The minors were not deported, and they escaped from a group home.
The campaign also referred us to a July 31, 2008, Chronicle article about a protest against San Francisco’s sanctuary city policy. That article mentioned that Edwin Ramos, a Salvadoran migrant who was living in the U.S. illegally, was “charged with three counts of murder” in a triple homicide. “Ramos, now 21, was convicted for an assault and an attempted robbery when he was 17, but city officials did not turn him over to federal immigration authorities,” the article said. Ramos was found guilty of the murders and sentenced to life in prison.
As those articles show, Trump was wrong. Harris’ office prosecuted and convicted the eight Honduran drug dealers and Ramos.
Those two incidents in 2008 prompted then-Mayor Gavin Newsom to change San Francisco’s sanctuary city policy over the objection of the city’s Board of Supervisors. Newsom directed city officials to report juveniles arrested on felony charges to ICE. In response, the supervisors adopted a new ordinance that allowed the city to report juveniles to immigration officials only after they had been convicted — an ordinance that Newsom vetoed and then ignored after his veto was overridden by the board.
Harris supported Newsom’s policy position, which became an issue for her when she unsuccessfully sought the Democratic presidential nomination in 2020.
As for shielding undocumented minors from deportation, Harris said in 2008 that the city’s “custodial agencies” — specifically the city’s sheriff’s office — were responsible for making referrals to federal immigration officials, not prosecutors.
That appears to be the case. In 2008, Newsom wrote an opinion piece for the Chronicle that indicated the sheriff’s office was responsible for making referrals to ICE.
“Newsom acknowledged that ‘[t]he system failed’ in the case of Edwin Ramos. However, he also emphasized that ‘[o]n a monthly basis, the sheriff refers to ICE some 80 to 100 undocumented individuals arrested for felonies,'” according to the 2011 UC Davis Journal of Juvenile Law & Policy article.
Guns
Trump claimed that Harris would make Americans “defenseless in your house” by banning guns.
“She supports mandatory gun confiscation,” Trump said in Atlanta. “Would anybody mind if they came into your house and took away your gun or your guns? … She’s for taking away all of your guns.”
In Montana on Aug. 9, Trump said four times throughout his speech that Harris wanted to “take away your guns,” once saying this would include “all of your guns.”
That’s misleading. While running for president in 2019, Harris said multiple times that she would support a mandatory buyback program for so-called “assault weapons” — but not all firearms.
In a November 2019 NBC News interview, for example, Harris said “there are certain types of weapons that should not be on the streets of a civil society,” referring to assault weapons, which she called “weapons of war.” She said she rejected the idea that “either you’re in favor of the Second Amendment or you want to take everyone’s guns away.”
As of 2024, Harris still supports a ban on purchasing assault weapons. However, her campaign told us that she is no longer advocating that Americans be required to turn in assault weapons that they already own.
Protests
Trump distorted the facts by claiming that Harris raised money to bail out “rapists and murders” and that she said people “should not stop” rioting in 2020.
“And during the left-wing riots of 2020, you saw that, she urged her followers to donate to bail rapists and murderers out of jail while saying that the violent mobs should not stop,” Trump said in Atlanta. “And she said, ‘Violent mobs, let the violent mobs keep going.’”
That’s not what Harris did or said.
As we’ve written, days after George Floyd was killed by a police officer in Minneapolis in May 2020, Harris and other well-known figures asked the public to help protesters who had been arrested by donating to the Minnesota Freedom Fund, a nonprofit that pays bail for individuals in jail while their court cases are pending. Harris posted on social media: “If you’re able to, chip in now to the @MNFreedomFund to help post bail for those protesting on the ground in Minnesota.”
The organization said it used some of the money it raised to pay bail and legal expenses for people who were arrested while protesting, but it also covered bail for some people who were jailed for other reasons. However, Harris only asked for donations to help protesters — not “rapists and murderers,” or people charged with committing other crimes.
Harris also did not encourage people to riot after Floyd’s murder. Trump was likely referring to comments that she made in a June 18, 2020, appearance on Stephen Colbert’s CBS talk show. During part of the interview, Harris, who said she participated in protests in Washington, D.C., after Floyd’s death, talked about the role that demonstrations play in getting the government to address social inequities.
After Harris answered his question about the importance of sustaining protests to affect change, Colbert said he had noticed a lack of media coverage of demonstrations that were still happening. That’s when Harris said: “They’re not going to stop. This is a movement, I’m telling you. They’re not going to stop. And everyone beware, because they’re not going to stop. They’re not going to stop before Election Day in November, and they’re not going to stop after Election Day. And everyone should take note of that on both levels. They’re not going to let up, and they should not, and we should not.”
But Harris never mentioned “violent mobs” or encouraged rioters to continue that kind of behavior. She and Colbert only talked about protests, which were overwhelmingly peaceful in the three months following Floyd’s death, according to a September 2020 analysis by the U.S. Crisis Monitor project. Harris even spoke out against violent protests in remarks on Aug. 27, 2020, after demonstrations following the police shooting of Jacob Blake in Kenosha, Wisconsin, led to two deaths.
Ending Cash Bail
Trump accused Harris of backing a plan that allows accused murderers to get out of jail before trial.
“Like other Marxist DAs, Kamala supports abolishing cash bail, which means bloodthirsty criminals that just killed somebody can immediately leave custody, go out and kill somebody else, which, by the way, they often do,” Trump said in Atlanta. He repeated the claim in an Aug. 13 interview on X with the platform’s owner and Tesla CEO, Elon Musk, saying “cashless bail” meant that “you kill somebody and they let you out right away. … And then they never find the people unless they kill again, and then they let them out again.”
In 2019, Harris released a plan “to fundamentally transform our criminal justice system” that said cash bail should be ended. Bail, which is often set by a judge, is the amount of money that a person accused of a crime must pay in order to be released from pre-trial detention while the case is pending.
Harris argued that excessive money bail is unjust and discriminates against “low-income communities and communities of color” who are less likely to be able to afford it. But ending cash bail does not necessarily mean that people charged with murder would be released from custody, as Trump said.
“As you note, it depends on what cash bail is replaced with,” Kellen Funk, a legal historian and law professor at Columbia Law School, told us in an email. “No serious commentator or politician has proposed eliminating cash bail and replacing it only with automatic release.”
Funk said proposals often “replace cash bail with judicial discretion,” which gives judges the option to detain defendants until trial, release them with “nonfinancial conditions” such as drug testing and a curfew, or release them without conditions except a requirement to appear in court.
For “felony homicide,” he said, “the law might recommend detention or set a presumption in favor of it, and in most cases in practice judges are inclined to order detention when the charges involve violent felonies.”
Ames Grawert, senior counsel in the Justice Program at New York University’s Brennan Center for Justice, made a similar point in a phone interview. He told us that policies eliminating cash bail are typically aimed at lower-level offenses, not murder.
“It’s just not the case that bail reform somehow makes it automatic that someone is released, especially if they are accused of a very serious offense,” Grawert said.
Harris’ 2019 proposal mentioned the Pretrial Integrity and Safety Act, which she and Republican Sen. Rand Paul introduced in the Senate in 2017. The bill authorized grants for states to reform or replace their cash bail systems with “individualized, pretrial assessments” that factor in the “risk of flight and risk of anticipated criminal conduct posed by a defendant while on pretrial release.”
Although the bill said there would be a “presumption of release in most cases,” a “preventative detention protocol” could be implemented “for cases in which a judicial officer determines, by clear and convincing evidence and after a hearing during which the defendant is represented by counsel, that the appearance of the defendant in court and the safety of the community cannot reasonably be assured through the use of any combination of [release] conditions.”
In other words, a suspect could be detained if a judge found that it was warranted.
Nonviolent Crimes
In Atlanta, Trump distorted the facts in claiming that Harris, as California attorney general, “defined and redefined child sex trafficking, assault with a deadly weapon, and rape of a unconscious person — an unconscious person raped — as nonviolent. These were nonviolent crimes,” adding that this was done “to help spring child predators and dangerous criminals out of prison all over the state.”
Harris didn’t define those things as “nonviolent.” The California penal code specifies 23 crimes as a “violent felony,” saying they “merit special consideration when imposing a sentence to display society’s condemnation for these extraordinary crimes of violence against the person.” The list includes sexual abuse of a child, rape and “great bodily injury,” as violations of specific laws. That means the list doesn’t cover everything that would be considered violent, and any felonies not specified are technically “nonviolent.”
As support for Trump’s claim, the campaign points to another ballot referendum, Proposition 57 in 2016, which also sought to deal with prison overcrowding by, among other things, allowing people convicted of “nonviolent felonies” to be considered for early-release parole. As the attorney general, Harris was responsible for writing the summary for Prop 57. That summary said: “Allows parole consideration for persons convicted of nonviolent felonies, upon completion of prison term for their primary offense as defined.”
An analysis of the measure by the state Legislative Analyst said: “The measure requires CDCR [California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation] to adopt regulations to implement these changes. Although the measure and current law do not specify which felony crimes are defined as nonviolent, this analysis assumes a nonviolent felony offense would include any felony offense that is not specifically defined in statute as violent.”
Prop 57 was approved by 64% of voters. CDCR did later issue regulations, saying that cases involving people registering as sex offenders couldn’t be considered by the parole board for early release under Prop 57. But the state Supreme Court struck down those regulations in 2020, saying they violated Prop 57.
That doesn’t mean sex offenders had to be released – it was up to the parole board. But they had to be considered for early release. “We emphasize that this determination does not require the release on parole of any inmate,” the court’s ruling said. “The evaluation of an inmate’s suitability for parole and the processes involved in conducting that evaluation remain squarely within the purview of the Department and the Board of Parole Hearings. … The Department is not permitted, however, to entirely exclude from parole consideration an entire class of inmates when those inmates have been convicted of nonviolent felony offenses.”
At any rate, Harris didn’t “define” or “redefine” the crimes Trump listed.
Nationwide Crime Data
Violent crime and murders nationwide have gone down during President Joe Biden’s term, according to FBI and other crime data, as we’ve written. But Trump has taken to citing a different set of data, the National Crime Victimization Survey.
“Nationwide, there’s been a 43% increase in violent crimes since I left office, including a 58% increase in rape, 89% increase in aggravated assault, and a 56% increase in stone-cold robbery,” Trump said in Atlanta, comparing data from 2020 to 2022 in the government’s National Crime Victimization Survey.
Typically, experts cite crime trends based on data from the FBI’s National Incident-Based Reporting System, which informs the annual Uniform Crime Report. Those are the statistics about crimes recorded by local and state law enforcement agencies around the country, and weighted to compensate for agencies that don’t provide data.
By contrast, the National Crime Victimization Survey provides estimates of crime based on interviews with a sample of people age 12 or older about crimes they experienced in the previous six months. It therefore captures many crimes that are never reported to police.
Experts who track crime in the U.S. say both are useful — albeit flawed — tools to capture the contours of crimes committed in the U.S. But as we said, experts typically refer to the FBI data when reporting crime trends. And, in fact, in past years when criticizing Biden for rising crime in 2021, Trump regularly cited that FBI data. Now that FBI data show violent crime decreasing, Trump has taken to calling those statistics “fake numbers.” They’re not.
“The victimization data and the FBI UCR measure different things,” Richard Berk, emeritus professor of criminology and statistics at the University of Pennsylvania, told us via email. “The victimization data come from surveys in which respondents report if they have been ‘victimized’ by ‘crimes’ asked about in very simple ways. Whether those victimizations were really crimes is hard to determine. And many of those ‘crimes’ are not reported to the police. Also, the willingness to report crime to the police can change rapidly over time depending on such things are media coverage. The UCR is based on crimes reported to the police and depends on voluntary cooperation from departments all over the county. Compliance has long been an issue because some department[s] do not cooperate. Of late, however, compliance has been improving substantially.”
While the two datasets usually follow the same trend lines, experts said, some years they do not. And 2022 was one of those years. The FBI reported that the rate of violent crimes — including murder — decreased in 2022, but the NCVS for 2022 — the latest year available — showed the serious violent crime victimization rate — which includes rape and sexual assault, robbery, and aggravated assault — rose from 5.6 the year before to 9.8 violent crimes per 1,000 population age 12 and older.
In an October report, criminologists at the Council on Criminal Justice wrote that the divergence between the FBI’s Uniform Crime Report and the NCVS “makes it uncertain whether violent crime actually went up or down in 2022.”
Nonetheless, crime analyst Jeff Asher, co-founder of the New Orleans firm AH Datalytics, warned it would be “best to avoid using NCVS to make declarative statements about crime trends,” as Trump did.
For starters, Asher told us via email, “it’s 2024 and the most recent NCVS covers 2022. Reported crime data does a much better job of highlighting current trends than NCVS.”
According to the FBI’s preliminary 2023 crime report, violent crimes dropped 5.7% between 2022 and 2023, and the number of murders declined 13.2%. The official 2023 report will be released this fall.
Asher also warned that NCVS is a survey “and 2020 and 2021 were particularly hard years to survey. The rise in violent crime in NCVS is predicated on violent crime being at historic lows in 2020 and 2021, and I’m skeptical that was the case.”
Asher also notes that NCVS doesn’t include murder — it’s a survey based on interviews with people, which by definition excludes those who have been murdered — “and murder is the crime with the highest societal cost. It’s also the crime that suffers the least from underreporting, so we have a good understanding of the murder trend which is a historic decline in 2023 and 2024.”
“The main weakness of the UCR is that it can only include crimes reported to the police,” Berk concurred. “So, both statistics have flaws, but those flaws differ. The best way to overcome these measurement problems is to focus on crimes that are NOT underreported and quite easily defined. Homicide is a good example because there is a body. A bad example is sexual assault because it is so underreported and can be hard to easily define from survey responses except in extreme cases.”
Data from the Major Cities Chiefs Association, with the addition of New York City’s statistics, show the number of murders has gone down by 9.1% from 2020 to 2023 in 70 large U.S. cities. Data collected by Asher show a 17.6% decline in murders so far this year, compared with the same point in 2023, in more than 250 cities.
And because it is a survey, Asher said, “NCVS has margins of error that add a ton of uncertainty. The rise in violent crime measured in NCVS can vary from an increase in the teens to a 60 to 70 percent increase.”
Finally, Asher said, “NCVS measures from year of survey rather than year of offense which makes picking up suddenly changing crime trends very difficult through NCVS. The survey asks if people have been the victim of a crime in the preceding six months, so it includes crimes from July 2021 to November 2022.”
“Put together, these factors make it particularly challenging to describe the exact shape of crime trends with strong confidence,” Asher said of using only the NCVS.
Berk recommended that people focus on local, rather than national, crime rates.
“Crime is a local issue,” Berk said. “The amount of crime and the kinds of crimes differ enormously in different regions of the country, different urban areas and different neighborhoods within those urban areas. So does citizen cooperation, police resources and police practices. To understand crime and the risks, citizens have to look at the data from their neighborhoods. … All the talk about crime at a national level is statistical nonsense that is nothing more than a political football. And it is a football in a political game over which national level policy can have little to no real effect. Local policies and practices can matter.”
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