WASHINGTON — Crime, including serious violent incidents like murder and rape, dropped nationally from 2022 to 2023, according to new data released by the FBI on Monday.
Violent crime was down about 3% from 2022 to 2023, and property crime took a similar drop of 2.4%, the FBI reported in its annual “Summary of Crime in the Nation.” The most serious crimes went down significantly: murder and non-negligent manslaughter were down an estimated 11.6% — the largest single year decline in two decades — while rape decreased by an estimated 9.4%.
Preliminary numbers showed that 2024 crime numbers were also dropping for the early part of this year, continuing a trend of easing crime as the U.S. has come out of the pandemic.
Among property crimes, burglary decreased by an estimated 7.6%. Motor vehicle theft, however, was up by an estimated 12.6% between 2022 and 2023. Recorded incidents of shoplifting were also up: from 999,394 in 2022 to 1,149,336 in 2023, which is roughly the same level of incidents reported in 2019, before the pandemic. (Store closures and COVID-19 security measures likely decreased shoplifting in 2020 and 2021, and may have affected 2022 incidents as well.)
Public perception of crime is often out of step with the facts, especially in the age of social media, ease of digital communications between neighbors and doorbell cameras, when Americans may be more aware of individual crimes than they would have been in the past.
But the violent crime rate dropped from 2022 to 2023, from 377.1 violent crimes per 100,000 people in 2022 to 363.8 violent crimes per 100,000 people in 2023, the new FBI data shows.
During a campaign stop in Kittanning, Pennsylvania, on Monday evening, former President Donald Trump had a different take on the numbers, claiming crime was “through the roof.”
“Only a stupid person would say crime has gone down,” Trump said. “You don’t have to know anything about numbers. If you live in this country, you know crime has gone up.”
As part of his 2024 campaign, Trump has tried to spread the notion that the United States is undergoing a crime wave, and he called the FBI’s prior numbers a “fraud” during his debate with Vice President Kamala Harris, saying that some cities weren’t included. But the FBI factors in the information gaps into their estimates. The bureau noted that its 2023 data included full-year numbers from “every city agency covering a population of 1,000,000 or more inhabitants.”
Overall, the FBI’s National Incident-Based Reporting System (NIBRS) collected information from 700 additional agencies in 2023 compared to 2022. The total population covered by the report is more than 315 million people, or 94.3% of the country.
President Joe Biden issued a statement Monday saying the FBI numbers confirm “that Americans are safer than when we took office,” adding violent crime was near a 50-year low.
“None of this happened by accident. Vice President Harris and I invested in public safety and took action to stop the illegal flow of guns into our communities. Our American Rescue Plan — which every Republican in Congress voted against — helped deliver over $15 billion in public safety funding that enabled over 1,000 state, city, and county governments to avoid cuts to police budgets, invest in community violence interventions, and take other essential steps to keep communities safe,” Biden said.
Zoë Richards contributed.
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