The Excerpt: Crime stats show improvement. Why do so many believe it's never been worse?

On a special episode (first released on January 17, 2024) of The Excerpt podcast: Crime in 2023 saw one of the largest declines in history. According to the FBI, murder is down double digits nationally. Violent crime, robberies, and burglary – all down. But if you ask the average American whether they think crime is under control, most will tell you it’s either extremely or very serious and over three quarters will say the problem is getting worse. The question is: why the disconnect? Ames Grawert, Senior Counsel at the Brennan Center for Justice, joins The Excerpt to discuss why the declining numbers and public perceptions are so at odds.

Hit play on the player below to hear the podcast and follow along with the transcript beneath it. This transcript was automatically generated, and then edited for clarity in its current form. There may be some differences between the audio and the text.

Podcasts: True crime, in-depth interviews and more USA TODAY podcasts right here

Taylor Wilson:

Hello, and welcome to The Excerpt. I'm Taylor Wilson. Today is Wednesday, January 17th, 2024, and this is a special episode of The Excerpt.

If it bleeds, it leads. For many working on the front lines of mainstream media, this time-tested mantra is how front pages and broadcasts are built, but there's a critical element this strategy misses almost entirely, context. Consider this, crime in 2023 saw one of the largest declines in history. According to the FBI, murder is down double digits nationally, violent crime, robberies, and burglary all down. But ask the average American whether they think crime is under control, most will tell you it's either extremely or very serious, and over three-quarters will say the problem is getting worse. The question is, why the disconnect? I'm now joined by Ames Grawert, senior counsel at the Brennan Center for Justice, who will help us understand why the numbers and our perceptions are so far apart. Ames, thanks for joining us on The Excerpt.

Ames Grawert:

Thank you so much for having me.

Taylor Wilson:

So, Ames, let's start with violent crime and look at some of the numbers here. What are they, and what's the narrative they tell us from 2023?

Ames Grawert:

Yes, absolutely. So I think it's helpful here to rewind back to the start of 2020, actually, to give some context to where we are. So in 2020, this, of course, was the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic lockdowns, protests, a very disrupted year, to put it extremely mildly. That year, we also saw a nearly 30% increase in murders year over year and a 10% increase in assaults nationally. Cities that track non-fatal shooting incidents, like New York City, saw huge spikes in New York City shooting, roughly doubled. Unfortunately, we don't yet track non-fatal shootings nationally. I expect you'd see the same thing if you did. One day, we will have a more robust crime tracking system. But that's the sort of context that is fairly recent in memory. Those increases started to level off in 2021. Then that brings us to the years 2022 or 2023, when we started to see fairly significant declines.

So if you look at FBI data, we saw around a 7% decline in murders nationally in 2022. Jumping ahead again to 2023, most reports you see by experts who track these data for a living show that we should expect even sharper declines in murder in big cities and likely, by extension, nationally. So what that starts to look like, if you put the whole picture together, it seems like we saw a very significant increase in violent crime at the start of the pandemic. That increase is now starting to recede. We're not back to where we were before the pandemic. We're not back to the near-historic loads we saw in 2014, but we're headed in the right direction, and that's extremely encouraging news.

Taylor Wilson:

So, Ames, what accounts for this drop? Are we talking about good economic factors, better policing? What accounts for this?

Ames Grawert:

It's a complicated question, and it's one that we've been studying at the Brennan Center for almost four years now. I think if you were sitting in 2020 as we were and trying to think through what might be the reason that we were seeing crime spike so significantly at the time, one theory you might have is that the COVID-19 pandemic is the perfect storm of factors that cause social disorder, dysfunction in our government, and all sorts of problems. So if that were your theory, you would posit, as I did to myself at the time, that maybe, when God willing, we start to see this pandemic move behind us, we might see these increases in crime start to abate too. That is, in fact, what we're seeing.

So I think there might be something to that theory. There's never a single-factor explanation to why crime trends move in such a significant way. We saw a huge decrease in crime, violent crime, murder between 1991 and 2014. Academics still debate what caused that. So I don't think there's any single-factor explanation for why crime rose in 2020 and why it's now falling. But I think the COVID-19 context is a huge one to keep in mind.

Taylor Wilson:

So, Ames, let's dig into that Gallup poll that captures how Americans are feeling about crime. 77% believe there's more crime now than a year ago. Americans are clearly still very concerned about crime rates. Why is that?

Ames Grawert:

Yeah, it's a great question. I should start by noting that it's actually not a new phenomenon. There's a trend going back to the 1990s that if you ask the average American at any given point in time whether they think crime is getting better or worse, most will say that nationally, they think it's getting worse. That was even true during many of the years of what I just mentioned, the great crime decline between 1990 and 2014 or so. So this gap between perception and reality is unfortunately not a new problem, but I think it gets a new gloss in the last few years. So the first thing I think about is, we did just see a huge increase just a couple of years ago, a huge increase in violence across the country, not just in cities, that some will have you believe, but in communities of all types.

People are understandably very concerned about that. I think that that concern, that fear, that perception of the world can linger. It takes a while for the data to catch up with people's understanding of the data, that's been hindered by some problems with the way the FBI collects and reports crime data, which we can definitely get into too. It's aggravated the disjoint between the way people perceive the world and what the data say. But there's some other issues too. One that I think about is, I think there's a possibility, a reasonable one as well, that people look at disorder and dysfunction in society and they see that and scan that as part of crime, even when it might not be, for example. We see store lawyers in downtown in many cities. Unsheltered homelessness has risen, for example.

During the pandemic government, social services went offline, went remote, or were much more limited. Patterns of downtown life changed. People might be reacting to that change from the way life used to be, and for the worst in some cases as well, referring to increase in homelessness, a lot more people living in dire circumstances. People want to see a society where many more people have stability, and they might scan the lack of that stability as something that goes to their safety, and that's certainly an understandable concern.

Taylor Wilson:

So, Ames, you're on a USA Today show right now. So let's talk about how the mainstream media reports crime. Do you think the news media has a perverse incentive to overhype crime, especially violent crime, in its coverage?

Ames Grawert:

That's an interesting question. I wouldn't go that far. I do think that the way the media ecosystem works today, and I've talked to some experts about this, we have so many different ways that we hear about crime stories. We might hear about the same story more often than we used to. That might drive a perception about whether that story is representative or anecdotal, for example. I do think there have also been some actors that we've worked with and have tried to respond to in our own work who have tried to blame rising crime on criminal justice reform and that narrative, not by fault of the media, but by fault of people who've been very opportunistic in using a political moment. That narrative had entered the mainstream media, and it's very important that we counter that with facts. But that takes time, and that takes hard work.

Taylor Wilson:

Ames, let's talk about the role social media might play in this conversation. We see these videos pop up on Twitter and TikTok showing spectacular brazen robberies, for instance, with mobs of looters. Are we seeing the same reduction in crime when it comes to property theft? I myself have seen a lot of videos related to this on social media.

Ames Grawert:

Yeah, this is a really tough question because a lot of the time, and especially when you talk about violent crime in the pandemic, we're talking about trends that really were national. When you look at most cities, most cities had that experience, like murder rates climbed in 2020 in New York City. They climbed in most other cities around the country. I'm aware of very few that bought the trend. As a proud New Jerseyan, I should know New York was one of them. But when you look at recent shoplifting trend, it's actually quite different. There's a new report that was published by the Council on Criminal Justice and an eminent research group that does just gold standard work. They showed that shoplifting trends were hugely burying city to city.

In New York City, there actually has been a fairly significant increase in shoplifting that goes back several years, even a decade almost. But that's not the case in every city. So one thing that might be happening is, some of the cities where those shoplifting increases are very real are cities that have a real influence on the way the national conversation and crime unfolds. New York City, Washington, DC, and those might be some of the reason that people said this narrative that shoplifting had risen so dramatically and it's so pervasive.

Taylor Wilson:

Ames, I'm going to put you on the spot here a little, but what surprises you most about this disconnect between what the crime stats tell us and how people feel?

Ames Grawert:

One of the things that surprises me most is the way a narrative about crime in cities has stuck around despite all the data to the contrary. So if we would rewind to the 1990s, it actually was true at the time that violent crime was very high in many cities. In New York City, I think the city had 2,000 murders a year in 1990. Last year, it was around 400. That's a huge decline. But this idea that cities are uniquely dangerous places in American life, especially blue cities, some people try to make a political claim out of it. That narrative has just stuck around, even as the data have just gone completely the other way.

New York City in 2022, or the FBI, had a murder rate lower than the national average. When crime rose in 2020, it rose in communities of all types, rural areas, suburbs, and big cities. So despite the fact that when we're talking about rising crime falling crime, a lot of times we're talking about national transnational issues, despite this idea that crime is a city issue, it's just stuck around. I'd very much like to do my best to bust that myth because I think it warps the way we think about public safety and the way we think about solutions to make everybody safer.

Taylor Wilson:

Finally, let me ask you the $64,000 question. This is obviously a high-stakes presidential election year.

Ames Grawert:

Yeah.

Taylor Wilson:

What role is this crime conversation playing in the election cycle?

Ames Grawert:

That's something we've put some thought into, too. It's an uncomfortable truth for federal politicians, that the American president does not have a fairly substantial degree of control over the American criminal justice system. The president has a great degree of control over the federal justice system, but that is very different from your state attorney's general, your district attorney. It's very powerful. So I think there's going to be some understandable jockeying for credit or blame, but in reality, this story is much more complicated. One thing we're also keeping an eye on is, like I mentioned earlier, there's been a narrative that criminal justice reform, bail reform, progressive prosecutors, things like that are why crime rose so recently. Those explanations just really don't hold water, especially when those prosecutors are still there. Bail reform is still the law of the land in New York, and crime is going down in a lot of those places. So we're watching very closely to see how people try to opportunistically make claims and politicize claims about the effect of reforms that are aimed at making our system fairer and more effective.

Taylor Wilson:

All right. Ames Grawert, really interesting insight. Thank you for coming on The Excerpt today and discussing this topic with us.

Ames Grawert:

Thank you for having me.

Taylor Wilson:

Thanks to our senior producer, Shannon Rae Green, for her production assistance. Our executive producer is Laura Beatty. Let us know what you think of this episode by sending a note to [email protected]. Thanks for listening. I'm Taylor Wilson, and I'll be back tomorrow with more of The Excerpt from USA TODAY.