Donald Trump has made the issue of crime a cornerstone of his campaign. He says violence in America is out of control and rising.
“You can’t walk across the street to get a loaf of bread. You get shot, you get mugged, you get raped,” the former president said recently at a campaign event north of Detroit.
But several years of national data tell the opposite story: Crime is falling in cities and towns across the United States. NBC News recently spent a day with Detroit police, who say Trump’s characterization is false.
“That’s simply not true,” Detroit Police Chief James White said. “I invite him to walk the streets of Detroit, and I’d be more than happy to do that with him and show him how Detroit is performing.”
Detroit has experienced a dramatic drop in murders, shootings and other violent crime in recent years, according to city, state and federal statistics. After surging during the pandemic, rates of violent crime have dropped back to where they were in 2019, the numbers show — dramatically lower than they were 10 and 20 years ago. Detroit had 252 homicides last year, the lowest number since 1966.
Over decades, murder has declined steeply nationwide. In New York City, there were 386 murders last year, down from 2,605 in 1990, according to the New York City Police Department.
The FBI’s crime statistics show a decline in violent crime across the U.S. over the last two years, and other data suggests it continued to fall in the first half of this year. Last month, new FBI numbers showed that murder declined 11.6% in 2023, the largest single year drop on record.
“I don’t think there’s a chief in America that will tell you, we can all go home now, crime has ended in our communities,” White said. “But when we compare where we are today, where we were yesterday, and where we were last year, and certainly where we were during the pandemic, we have reduced crime in the city of Detroit.”
Detroit has long ranked as of America’s most crime-ridden big cities and, based on the volume of violence, it still is. But nonfatal shootings fell by 18% last year, according to the city, and carjackings dropped by a third.
Detroit has taken a number of unique steps that police say have deterred crime, including facilitating the installation of cameras at more than 1,000 gas stations and other businesses in high-crime neighborhoods. The cameras are monitored by officers watching a bank of screens at a downtown headquarters nerve center.
But the pandemic crime surge is receding across America.
FBI data released last month shows that violent crime fell nationally in 2023 for the second year in a row, and other crime statistics support that conclusion. A Justice Department study of 88 cities showed a 16.9% decline in murder in the first half of this year, on pace for another record drop.
Yet, polls show a vast majority of Americans — 77%, by one recent measure — believe crime is still rising.
Criminologists say local news and social media are fueling that misperception. But Trump and his allies have also cherrypicked statistics and falsely told supporters that FBI crime data can’t be believed.
“They were defrauding statements,” Trump said during the September presidential debate. “They didn’t include the cities with the worst crimes. It was a fraud.”
That is wrong: The FBI’s latest annual numbers covered 94% of the U.S. population, including every city of more than a million people.
Trump and others who seek to cast doubt on the data have taken advantage of the fact that measuring crime is a complex, inexact science, and not every data source is consistent.
Further complicating the picture, the FBI during the Trump administration ushered in a change in how it collects crime data from cities, and several big cities were not included in the annual numbers for 2021, when the change was implemented.
But by 2022, the FBI solved its data omission problem by allowing cities that were having trouble switching to the new system to submit numbers under the old system.
Crime data skeptics also have attributed declining crime numbers to “woke prosecutors” who are failing to file charges. That, too, is wrong: The FBI’s crime data is based on crimes reported to police — it has nothing to do with whether those crimes were prosecuted.
Doubters also cite the Justice Department’s annual survey of crime victims, which — unlike FBI data — seeks to count both reported and unreported crimes by interviewing people in person and asking whether they have been victimized over the past six months.
In contrast to FBI data, which found that crime had declined, the most recent victim survey found that violent crime was flat in 2023 compared with 2022.
During the pandemic, in 2020 and 2021, the victim survey showed a strange result that contradicted the FBI’s data — it found that rates of violent crime were falling. The FBI had found that during those two years, violent crime was increasing and that murders, which the victim survey does not measure, were skyrocketing, only to plummet in the years following.
Some experts say the victim survey results for those years may be suspect, since they don’t reflect the increases seen in the FBI data. But Trump uses these low 2020 and 2021 victim survey numbers, despite the doubts cast on them, to argue that violent crime has spiked significantly during the Biden-Harris administration.
Trump and his allies have ignored the fact that the victim survey data, consistent with FBI data, has found that overall rates of crime have fallen back to the historically low levels they had reached in 2019.
“Findings show that there was an overall decline in the rate of violent victimization over the last three decades, from 1993 to 2023,” Kevin Scott, acting director of the Bureau of Justice Statistics, said in a statement, adding that the rate “was not statistically different from the rate 5 years ago, in 2019.”
Jeff Asher is a former CIA analyst who studies crime data and recently rolled out the Real-Time Crime Index, a web tool that will aggregate monthly crime data, from 500 to 1,000 local police departments to visualize nationwide crime trends.
“The violent crime rate was likely roughly even in 2023 compared to 2019 and is likely going to be lower in 2024,” he told NBC News.
His index found that murder across 277 major cities fell 16.7% so far this year compared to last year.
Criminologist Alex Piquero of the University of Miami says Asher’s index is one of five credible sources of crime data, including the victim survey, the FBI numbers, the University of Chicago’s live crime tracker and the Major Cities (Police) Chiefs Association. All show that crime has fallen back to pre-pandemic levels.
“They are all telling the same story for the most part,” he said. “Crime is down.”
But residents of the U.S. still experience much higher levels of gun violence than any other country in the industrialized world. And for families whose lives have been shattered by that violence, statistics are meaningless.
Jordan Thornhill, who grew up in a verdant suburb north of Detroit, had recently graduated from Michigan State and was attending a block party in the city July 5. He was on the phone with his brother when gunshots rang out and he fell silent. His brother later found his body. Police are investigating whether he was hit by celebratory fire.
“I lost my son. Why? Why did it happen?” a tearful Venecca Thornhill told NBC News, sitting alongside her husband, Andre Thornhill. “Jordan should have been able to come home that night with his brother as intended but he didn’t make it here.”
Andre Thornhill said he understands that crime is down. It doesn’t make his pain any less sharp.
“We are now part of a club that we didn’t sign up for but now we have to accept, accept that,” he said, “and we have started to forge friendships with other victims’ family members, to try to give them some support and they try to give us some support.”
The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) announced a $25,000 reward for information that would help the agency solve Jordan Thornhill’s killing.
“It’s heartbreaking,” White, the police chief, said. “What happened to Jordan Thornhill is tragic, and Jordan Thornhill represents every child in the city, right? This is a kid that did exactly what you would want a kid to do. He graduated from Michigan State University. His parents are loving and supportive, a true, beautiful American family in our city.”
He added: “We’re going to continue to expand on what worked, but we’re not going to tear our rotator cuff patting ourselves on the back, either. We’ve got a lot of crime in our city, a lot of violent crime, and we’ve got a lot of folks who are using guns to resolve relatively simple disputes.”
