Welcome to Crash Course, a podcast about business, political, and social disruption and what we can learn from it. I'm Tim O'Brien. Today's crash Course crime trends versus statistics and reality. After many years of reassuring declines, some crime rates soared nationwide during the COVID nineteen pandemic. Homicides jumped about thirty percent in twenty twenty compared to the prior year, and
violent assaults rose by more than ten percent. According to a number of different groups that track the data, these trends weren't geographically or politically specific. Residents in cities, suburbs, and rural areas all suffered through that shift, and it didn't matter if they lived in a city run by a Democrat or a Republican. More murders, the data showed, plagued every urban area. On the other hand, robberies, burglaries,
and larcenies dropped during the pandemics onset. As the pandemic, war on murder rates andolent crime rates overall settled down, the numbers rose, but not nearly as sharply as they did early on. Another wrinkle, crime statistics are subject to spotty methodology and reporting gaps, making it hard to rely
on the data with absolute certainty. Public safety isn't a trivial topic, and there's no question that many Americans say they feel less safe on some streets than they once did, despite the fact that violent crime rates are well below where they were during the nineteen nineties. So what was behind the pandemic surge and murders and assaults and what lessons can residents and public officials draw from what happened.
Joining us today to chat about all of this is Ames Growert, a lawyer and expert on crime statistics at the Brennan Center for Justice at the NYU Law School. The Brennan Center is a nonprofit focused on a number of legal and public policy issues, including research into the sources of violent crime. Welcome, Ames, Thank.
You so much for having me. It's a pleasure to be here.
So set the stage alone a little bit for us. First, tell us a little bit about the work you do at the Brennan Center and how the Brennan Center intersects with crime research and crime statistics.
Absolutely so. Our theory of criminal justice reform is that we can have a country that is both safer and fairer, that we can has common sense criminal justice reform policies that lead to a justice system that is fairer to all who are impacted by it. That's including people who are victims of crime as well as people accused of crime, and that while doing so, we can also have a safer country. As a whole. Part and parcel of that research is trying to understand what's actually happening when it
comes to crime trends around the country. So around eight years ago, some colleagues before I joined the Brendan Center actually released a report called What Caused the Crime de Client. This is sort of the origin of this work, but it's also very much still relevant to the work we do today. They're thinking was, we need to understand the huge drop off and crime rates that happened between nineteen
ninety one and roughly twenty fourteen. Over that course of time, murder rates in the United States the drops of half. Some sociologists call this the Great Crime Decline. It's a rarely remarked upon but incredibly important social phenomenon. So they set out to figure out, you know, why what happened.
They came to a couple conclusions, one of which is it's very difficult to untact something that complicated, but a couple of their findings were that improving economic conditions partially helped explain drops in crime nationwide, and that incarceration was
not as powerful an explanation as some had expected. So that was the genesis of this work, an idea that we need to you know, understand what's really happening with crime trends across the country, and that you know, we continue to this day to monitor what's happening around the country, keep abreast of the very best research, and contribute our own where we can well.
And socioeconomic factors play into our understanding what happened during the pandemic too, So let's get into that a little bit. What happened in the early stages of the pandemic, particularly twenty twenty, that caused homicides and violent crimes to spike.
Yeah, just to give you a bit of context, I know you touched on at the top of the show, but the key statistics are we saw the national murder rate increase by about thirty percent year every year from twenty nineteen to twenty twenty. We saw assault increase by around ten percent or so, you know, that's a significant increase in violence. And I think, much like we don't have a complete answer as to, you know, why crime dropped so precipitously between you know, the early nineteen nineties
and today. We don't yet have and may not have for a long time, a full accounting of what happened during the COVID nineteen pandemic. When my colleagues and I investigated this to try to figure out, you know, what could explain such a dramatic increase in violence concentrated in such a short period of time. We can do a couple explanations, but we've always been careful, and I just want to re emphasize to your listeners too, that this
isn't the full accounting. We're not saying, you know, these are the factors that one hundred percent explained everything that happened since twenty nineteen. I don't know who'll ever get there, but a couple of those factors were Number one, increasing access to firearms and increasing carrying and use of them. And I can go into that at greater length. It's really interesting.
So, surprise, surprise, more guns on the street produce more violence against other people. That's about right, I'm shocked to discover that.
You know, so often we look for counterintuitive findings, but this just feels very intuitive. It's sometimes these sort of explanations that resonate with us. It's just common sense. There actually is research back into it, and people can push back and say, you know, well, it's true that more guns is an mulos equal more crime. A lot of second and third guns are bought by collectors, but in the pandemic, we actually did see a sort of closer link at least between more guns more crime.
There had been years of a surge on guns on the streets that also corresponded with a drop in homicides and violent crimes. So even there, the link is not entirely direct, right, It's.
Very complicated yet. So one of the pandemic ara statistics we look at is something that the ATF refers to as time to crime. What that means is when a gun is recovered from a crime scene, how long ago was it lawfully purchased. So it's sort of the time between when a gun enters the market legally and when it turns up at a crime scene. Time to crime actually dropped during the first two years of the COVID nineteen pandemic that suggests there's sort of a closer link
between gun purchases and guns being used unlawfully. But frankly, this is an area where we need more research to understand better the link between gun purchases and gun violence.
Were there other factors in addition to availability to firearms? Access to firearms?
Yes, So this is a tough one. I think. You know, when you talk to some people, they will give you a very strong case of this argument, and I'm going to give you the sort of middle way case of the argument, that is that the social disruption caused by the COVID nineteen pandemic had some effect on crime trends,
and especially violent crime. This is a tough one because I don't know if we'll ever be able to fully quantify exactly how this relationship played out, What happened, What's the mechanism that explains the link between the onset of the pandemic and violent crime. We might not ever have a full understanding of that, but a couple of mechanisms that we're sort of thinking through are this. When we saw the pandemic begin, the government response was not immediately
adequate and not immediately encouraging. So a lot of people and people that we talked to in communities affected by violence said that members of their community lost faith in the government, didn't believe that their institutions were there to
keep them safe. At the same time, a lot of basic parts of the community fabric, like libraries, third places so called where people can congregate after work or on the weekends, those shut down or inaccessible programs like community violence intervention initiatives, which are programs run by people at street level to help stop violence, support starts. Those sor programs often have to be run face to face, and you can't do that during a respiratory pandemic. That's just
not how it works. So all these factors that sort of work together in the background almost to keep communities safe, all of them sort of fell apart at once, And it would almost be surprising if that had no effects. The question that we ask, and I think researchers need to continue to ask, is what sort of effect did it have? What was the magnitude of that effect?
So it would all be under the umbrella of people freaked out, it.
Would be more into the umbrella of once in a generation pandemic having untold, difficult to quantify, difficult to really fully appreciate, effects on the social fabric and the sort of informal ties that keep the communities safe.
Yeah, people certainly had existential dread. People were reaching out to connect to one another more, and it was uncertain what the pandemic's effects would be. It's interesting to me to contemplate that. Then another stage and thinking was lashing out against other people, you know, either with guns or hands. Yet another statistic in all of that, though, is interesting
to me, is that auto thefts also jumped. So in addition to, you know, you had certain kinds of crime to decline, and then you had homicides and assaults jump, but auto thefts jumped too. What are you thinking about that? That's a category to me that's sort of intriguing.
Yeah, this is a really interesting one. One way to think about what happened during the COVID nineteen pandemic is how does the onset of a major respiratory virus affect someone's opportunity to commit a type of crime. So retail thefts tended to drop during the COVID nineteen pandemics. People simply weren't going to stores but at the same time, you know, you might not have eyes on your car that you parked up the street a couple of weeks ago because you haven't left your house. That's one factor
that might partially explain increasing motor vehicle thefts. But there are a couple others too. One and this comes from a conversation I had with Jeff Asher, who's a fantastic analyst of crime trends. He pointed out that motor vehicle thefts tend to go hand in hand with more serious forms of violence. So, you know, a car is stolen and then used in a drive by shooting, so it's possible that, you know, you would see that type of offense increase alongside murder, which is what we in fact
saw during the COVID nineteen pandemic. More recently, there have been security vulnerabilities discovered and a couple of vehicle brands, and there have been videos and stuff.
So glad you're bringing this up. You're getting to the TikTok video. Yeah, part of the argument. Excellent.
Yeah, there's a social media video explaining how easy it is to short circuit the security defenses of some vehicles.
And specifically kias and Hyundais.
I believe, Yeah, I believe that's right. And I can't tell you that that explains, you know, fifty percent or whatever percent of the increase in motor vehicle thefts, but it's not trivial. I think that that sort of effect of not just opportunity but means becoming more available might help explain the increase in those offenses as well.
So all of the reasons you're giving for why the numbers jumped, both in these separate categories which can be caused by unrelated factors, and then some of the ones that are caused by related factors, none of these are necessarily the reasons that captured the public's imagination as to why homicides and violent crime were rising in year one of COVID nineteen. Tell me about that. What were the reasons that many people latched onto for why this was happening.
Yeah, that's the key question. One of the frustrating things about working on crime research and trying to understand the way the criminal justice system works is it's easier to disprove some theories than it is to proved them. That's because the data are very hard to come by sometimes,
But when you have a concrete idea. Sometimes you can gather the data you need to actually test the theory, and that's what my colleagues and I have done in some cases, and researchers around the country have done in others. And I'll get to exactly what the data show in a minute. But one of the most popular theories about, you know, why crime rose, especially in New York City,
was bail reform. This was a major initiative enacted in twenty twenty that changed the way the state's pre trailer released laws worked, so detension bail were largely taken off the table for our misdemeanors in some lower level felonies. People jumped to the conclusion very quickly that bail reform might explain rising crime in New York City. But when you really kick the tires of that data, it just
doesn't add up. For one, as you know, as we've been discussing folent crime and murders rose around the country, it would be very odd, indeed, if bail reform in New York somehow powered a nationwide increase in violent crime. It just doesn't compute. Really. Subsequent researchers backed that up as well, and I'm happy to go into that too. Another point that people argued was that this might be a quote city phenomenon, that this is something that originates
in nebulously defined, quote blue city governance. I think this idea is sort of a holdover of the way crime used to look in this country. You know, if you go back to the nineteen nineties, there were multiple thousands of murders in New York every year. Amasite raid in a city like New York was well about the national average, And I think people sort of came to expect that violent crime is a city problem. But fast forward thirty
years down the line, that's not quite so true. New York City is one of the safest big cities in the country. It's murder rate is below the national average. So this idea that violent crime was caused by and primarily a problem of cities, it's also simply not true, but became a very prevalent narrative, especially during the early
days of the COVID nineteen pandemic. One of the other theories that we've looked into, and others have really taken a lot of time to try to research, is whether the inauguration of district attorneys who believe in criminal justice reform policies. The label you here as quote progressive prosecutors, But I've talked to these people. They don't all subscribe to that label. They subscribe to the idea that they are elected district attorneys who believe in criminal justice reform policies.
But one of the arguments against them has been that.
We'll still wanting to enforce the law.
Indeed, yes, they're elected district attorneys who believe in criminal justice reform as a means of making their community safer, not as a political point. So one of the arguments has done that these so called progressive prosecutors have presided over a rise at crime and helped kick it off in their cities, and the data just don't support that.
There's a really good study that was co authored by Anna Harvey at NYU's Public Safety Lab that tried to revide a relationship between progressive prosecuters and rise and crime, and she couldn't do it. She just couldn't find any sort of relationship. More researchers coming out on this. Now, that was a popular narrative, but it just hasn't held up.
And then moreover in successive years, in twenty twenty one and twenty twenty two, the homicide rate drop, the rate of violent crimes dropped. What changed? Do you have a handle on what was behind that phenomenon.
That's a question we're sitting with too. I actually think it does suggest one point. So if you were as we were sitting in the beginning of the COVID nineteen pandemic and wondering, you know, what's happening in the country,
why are we seeing crime rates increase so much? If you had a theory that part of this might be due to factors related to the COVID nineteen pandemic, like social disorder, like the shuddering of key institutions that help keep communities safe, you might hypothesize that as the pandemic recedes, we might start to see murder rates go down, and
that is in fact what we're now seeing. So I think it's a point of evidence that suggests, but doesn't conclusively prove, that much of the reason that we sew violence spike so much in the early years of the pandemic might be due to these factors related to the pandemic, And as the world sort of returns to normal, as businesses reopen, as people get back to their daily life. As community rhythm's return, that sort of network of safety and invisible bonds that keep us safe sort of re
establishes itself. I don't have a complete answer for this question, but I think that's at least one theory worth thinking over.
So the lesson to be drawn from that is state away from guns during year one of any lockdown, because that's when people are most likely to fire them.
A question we think about too is sort of how to build resilience into communities and how do you build resilience into society as a whole? And trust absolutely and trust I think that's a really good way of putting it. There were some surprising things that we found when we looked into, you know, not just what caused crime to increase in twenty twenty, but you know what solutions people
were talking about. There's actually some research these days that medicaid expansion, which we just saw go into place, and I believe it was North Carolina, is actually associated with lower arrest rates and lower rates of priscidivism in some cases. This suggests to me that as you build a society that has a stronger safety net and is more focused on taking care of people. You might help firm up that sort of invisible network that keeps us all safer.
On that note, Ames, I'm going to take a quick break so we can hear from a sponsor, and then we will come back in to chat further about all of this. We're back with Ames GROWERDT and we're discussing murder and other crimes during the pandemic and after Ames we talked a little bit earlier about people citing the wrong factors for this spike and murder and viol and assaults during the pandemic and what some of the real
factors might have been. You know, we're having this conversation and the context of the data is still recently fresh. The events are still relatively recent, and no one knows for certain, but our goal is to try to really get it real cause and effect so we can get better solutions. How was the narrative around the crime spike during the COVID pandemic and after construct it. I'm interested
in that from your perspective. How did that narrative come into the public consciousness, because it's certainly different than some of what we just talked about earlier in terms of the factors that actually informed the spike.
Yeah, that's a really good question and something I spend a lot of time thinking about. I'll do my best to give you as clear of an answer as I can,
but it's a complicated subject. On the one hand. You know, I think when people see something like the covidanteen pandemic and they see, you know, hard data showing what they're feeling that violence is increasing, people naturally feel afraid and feel concerned for their states, see in the safety their loved ones, and those feelings are valid and important, and we should respect that. Number one one temptation when these very reasonable fears arise, I think it's tempting for some
to look for sort of easy explanations. It's tempting to say this is a problem, and here's the solution, and that solution will work tomorrow. When people gravitate to those easy answers, those answers feel good, they might sound attractive, but they might be wrong, and more than that, they
might actually end up doing more harm than good. So I think that's one factor, and telling the narrative onward is know, when crime rose, people looked for sort of a single factor answer, you know, crime rose by thirty percent in twenty twenty because of X, and insert into X, you know, bail reform, quote, blue city, something like that. That answer might have a certain narrative and intuitive appeal,
it just happens to be wrong. Another factor I think we've seen, and I touched on this a little bit earlier, is I think because of the way that crime trends in the country used to look, people are sort of primed to think of crime as a city issue rather than an American issue, and people are primed to believe that cities like New York are uniquely dangerous, when actually almost the opposite is true. Representative Jim Jordan hosted a field hearing in New York City designed to highlight how
crime in the city was increasing. It just happened to be at a time when murder trends in the city were actually declining sharply, and the evidence for rising crime in New York City was simply nowhere to be found. You know, the city, like other places in the country, had experience of crime spike during the pandemic, but by all accounts that spike was in the process of reversing.
These narratives, they have an intuitive appeal. It's up to you know, policymakers and other opinion leaders like us in fact, to talk through why those narratives might not actually be true and why there might be other solutions that can make us safer. A colleague of mine who I do some work with, in Hirahman at the Beer Institute. She has a really interesting saying, I think in something that I think about daily. She says, you know, if we focus on the wrong problems, we also focus on the
wrong solutions. So if you yourself in a narrative where you think the reason that crime is up is because cities are doing something wrong and bail reform or progressive prosecutor or something like that, you might miss some other solution that has nothing to do with those quote problems and that could actually lead to safer communities down the line.
And as I noted at the top of the show, suburbs and rural areas saw a very similar spike to what cities saw. So the idea again that cities themselves are unique kind of breeding grounds or Petrie dishes for violent crime is belied by reality in the data.
That's exactly right.
Having said that, aims about the similarities of suburbs and rural areas and cities. There is also reality at work here. However, there is no denying that city streets do for a lot of people feel less safe. A lot of small businesses have boarded up, there's less people walking around in
the streets, particularly late at night. Homelessness has been on the rise in every big city I think, or at least most of the big ones, and I've visited a number of them since COVID began, and you just notice homeless people wandering in greater numbers in the past, and there is this perception that the streets aren't as safe, even if the data doesn't show us that. Let's talk about that a little bit, because that is a reality based conclusion for a lot of folks.
Absolutely it is, yes, And when people have that impression, they were reacting to something real. I'm not one to discount people's experiences and fears about their community. I think one thing at work here is people see social disorder, People see hardship in their lives, such as an increasing number of people living on the streets, and they make a sort of intuitive connection between bad and crime. But social disorder and crime are not necessarily one of the same.
They might in some cases go hand in hand, but that might be one reason why we see a sort of a gap between the perceptions and realities around the trends, especially in major offenses. These are real problems. They don't want to downplay it. Like I've seen the data on homelessness and Portland, I've seen the data on homelessness in California and New York, and you're right, it is up.
But the solutions to those problems might lie outside the criminal justice system, where they might lie in other policy interventions disconnected from the problem of crime in the United.
States, and the sense of menace that some people might feel from a homeless person doesn't necessarily translate into the homeless person whipping out a gun and shooting you or assaulting you.
Right, But you know people's fears about their safety and about seeing disorder in their community. I want to make sure that we take that seriously, and policymakers should. They should just be careful about what solutions we can offer to try to build healthier communities for everyone.
Two of the other sort of marquee incidents that have I think also make people worried about cities are shoplifting waves. As we know from the data, most shoplifting is carried out by a small cohort, often acting in conjunction with one another. They're repeat offenders. Again, that doesn't take away from the fact that the shoplifting is occurring and it appears to be unstopped. Storefronts are shattered, or people walk into a retail store and just sweep stuff off the shelves.
Have you thought about shoplifting it's just a category of sort of urban blight, or maybe the data there I don't actually know. Is the data similar again across the board of shoplifting a problem also in suburbs and in rural areas as well.
This is a challenging question too, because there are a number of things that can explain trends in shoplifting. Different stores have different strategies or protocols for reporting shoplifting to the police. For example, a colleague is a former prosecutor mentioned this to me. You know, if I go into a convenience store every day one week and steal you know, ten dollars worth of property, is it the store policy to report me the first time and every subsequent time?
Is it the store policy to call the police only after the seventh and then report every incident. These sort of differences in how stores and store owners report shoplifting to police can sort of confound our understanding of the data, and it makes it very hard to understand precise trends in shoplifting around the country and individual cities. One thing does seem to be clear, though, and most data that we have does point to this, and that is that
shoplifting has increased in some major cities. In New York City, the data seems very clear that shoplifting increased sharply in twenty twenty two, and that it actually increased year over year for I think going back more than a decade. So the problem is very real, even if we need better data to fully understand what's going on.
And tell me. As a last category before we move on to other and grander things, or carjacking, that has also seemed to have been on the rise in urban areas, prekly in places like Chicago, in very stark ways. You know, drivers are pulled over by another car, or is they're getting out of a car or into a car, they're essentially held up and their car is stolen. And that seems to be a more frequent and visible crime than it was a few years ago.
That's right, and this is actually a tough crime for us to study as well. I feel like I'm saying that a lot, but you can get an idea of how challenging the data can be. Sometimes. The reason is that, until very recently, and I know we'll talk about this in more detail, car jacking was not broken out as a separate fence studied by the FBI. It was sort of rolled into robbery. So in many places we don't really have an idea of year to year trends in carjacking.
The data that we do have does show that it is increasing or increased in twenty twenty two. We also know from city reports. I think you mentioned Chicago. I'm not familiar with the data, but I'm sure you're right. But we know in Washington, DC carjackings definitely have increased. As to why it's a tough question, I go back to something I mentioned earlier. There might be some correlation between types of motor vehicle theft and other more serious crimes.
As you steal a car, you carjack a car to be used in a more serious efense down the line. It could be that those types of defenses go hand in hand.
And is there like a psychology of crime that when you see categories of crime as a resident spike, whether it's murders or assaults, it leads you to believe that every kind of crime that could take place might take place and will also increase. And that sort of feeds on itself, and people can get into that space without necessarily finding easy ways to reverse the fears they're feeling.
I think that's true. It goes to a sort of broader concept. I think people of all types like to see accountability and like to see people, you know, face consequences for their actions. So if they see people committing crimes and facing no consequence for it, it leads them to draw broader conclusions about the health of society and the moral fabric of their communities. That might be one way that we see fears about one type of crime
bleed over into another. Sort of an interesting thing if you ask people what types of crime they're most worried about, it really depends on the community. Number One, when we saw violence brise in twenty twenty, it was very very uneven. The violence spiked more in New York city, for example, in neighborhoods that have always been for have always struggled with violence, so that increase might not have been as
visible to other people. But often you see people are more worried in some cases about what we in the policy field might call relatively lower level offenses, as in not the most serious offenses known to law enforcement, but crimes like shoplifting, crimes like turnstile jumping, things like that. Those sort of crimes can definitely affect people's perception of safety.
And this is a good moment to point out that it is our neighbors and fellow Americans at the lowest part of the socioeconomic ladder who experience the brunt of violent crime increases, particularly homicides and violent assaults. So within those statistics, they don't apply in a blanket and uniform way across our society. They really affect usually the most vulnerable and disadvantaged people the hardest.
That's absolutely right. There's a complicated relationship between poverty and crime, but if you look at cities around the country, you tend to see violence and rising crime in twenty twenty clustered in communities that have suffered from other disadvantages. Those sort of inequalities have always existed, you know, you go back years, you'll see the same sort of prends. They simply became more exaggerated or pronounced during the COVID nineteen ten.
Dem let's take another break, games, then we'll come right back. We're back, and I'm having a conversation about crime and the COVID nineteen pandemic with Aames Groward. Ames, I think we have a data collection and data analysis problem around crime statistics that transcends politics and disagreements, and maybe it even makes them worse from my perspective, But I was wondering what you thought of that.
That's absolutely right. Someone we've worked with before, a law professor John faff I'm going to borrow point that he makes, and that is we have up to the minute data on the economy, unemployment data, jobs created, et cetera. But when it comes to our data on crime, until very recently, we had to wait almost a year, nine to ten full months between the end of a year and the release of national crime data by the Federal Bureau of Investigation. So be give you an example. If you wanted to
see national crime data on twenty nineteen. You had to wait until late September twenty twenty for that data to come out. That's nowhere close to the real time data that policymakers need to actually craft interventions and understand what's happening in their community relative to communities around the country now. To be sure, local data is much more up to date. I could pull up New York City's constant portal right now and it would have data that's probably less than
a week old. Depending on the day of the week, it might be, you know, yesterday. But when we don't have national data, or when we have delayed national data, it also has an effect on the narrative. So to give you an example, you know you will hear policymakers talk about rising crime in major cities. Over the past month, I've heard many policymakers on the federal level talk about rising crime in major cities. In every case, they're citing
data from twenty twenty. You know, that's three years ago. Why aren't they using more recent data? Why aren't they aware of more recent data? And the answer is not necessarily bad faith. The answer might be in part that we have such a delay between the year that we're interested in studying and when crime data actually come out that it sort of takes a while for the public
to understand and adjust to what those data show. There's sort of a lag time between our reality of national crime trends and our perception of what those trends actually look like. And it's actually gotten worse in the past couple of years due to transition of the way the FBI calculates crime data, which I could talk to you about as well well.
Since you mentioned the FBI, My Bloomberg Opinion colleague Justin Fox, who loves to crunch and examine numbers around all sorts of things, has been particularly frustrated by the FBI's methodology. He recently wrote this about how the FBI colates data around four major crimes to analyze violent crime rates, and I'm quoting Justin here. To calculate violent crime rates, the FBI simply adds together the incidents of the four violent crimes, meaning the rate ends up being determined by the most
common ones, robbery and especially aggravated assault. That's not great. What do you think of Justin's thoughts on that?
Your colleague is absolutely right to make the problem even more stark when people talk about the overall crime rate, what they tend to be referring to is the incidences of the four violent offenses that Justin referred to, plus the three property crime offenses historically tracked by the FBI, so burglary, larceny, motor vehicle theft. But when you add all those together, larceny is far and away the most
common offense, overwhelming all of them. So when people talk about the quote crime rate, there's often a risk that you're really talking about the larceny rate with some other crimes thrown in there. It's a very sort of blunt way of looking at crime trends.
And skewed statistically skewed.
Yes, especially because we actually saw this phenomenon in the COVID nineteen pandemic. Larcenies have fallen for starting in nineteen ninety, they fill every year until I think twenty twenty two. So you could look at quote overall crime data in twenty twenty and see a decline in crime rates twenty nineteen to twenty twenty. So you could hear people say, well, the murder rate is up and respond with well crime is down, and you're both right. But if you're discounting
a thirty percent spike in murder. By looking at larceny data, you're just not.
Doing apples and oranges.
Yes, as oranges. You're not doing the real analysis the public needs. That's part of the challenge of it.
So how do we get better data so we all have better confidence in what we're talking about?
So here I actually have some good news for you, which I think we're all eager for. At this time, the FBI is in the process of a transition to something called the National Incident Based Reporting System. So when that transition is done, we will have two things. Number One, we'll have a system that tracks a much wider array of offenses in much greater detail. So we won't just have
data on larsenies. We'll have data on larceny dash, shoplifting, larceny dash, by fraud, larceny dash, you know, every variety of every variety of crime. That's going to allow for much richer, more thoughtful analysis of crime trends year over year. And you can actually see that in some work already, because many cities have already adopted this new system. You can see that in some work by the Council and
Criminal Justice A great nonprofit organization. They put together an analysis of shoplifting trends across the country using NYBERS data, which is how people in my field refer to the National Incident based Crime Reporting System, and they had a much richer look at what's actually happening shoplifting around the country. It was really interesting. Their finding was, as we discussed, that it's a real problem in New York. But so number one, we'll have a richer analysis of what the
data actually look like. Number two will actually have more timely data. The FBI is in the process of rolling out quarterly reports, so rather than have to wait for September October every year for your dose of national crime data, every quarter you should get a little more data on the national picture. That data will still have a lag time, it will still be fairly stale by the time you read it, but you won't have to wait a year.
And I think that's the real improvement and should help policymakers come to better and more thoughtful and more timely conclusions about crime data. I can't give you unallied good news here though, because although this new system is going to be fantastic when it's fully implemented, implementation is going better than it was a year ago, but it's not
going great. That's because to switch over to the system, police departments, that is, the agencies that report crime data up through their state to the federal government, have to rework their computer systems and their way of tracking crime data. That takes time, that takes money, it's difficult to do, take staff, and many departments, through no fault of their own, don't have the ability to do that and.
Happen, including some pretty big ones, some.
Very big ones in fact, so Florida and Pennsylvania remain big blind spots and the incident based reporting system, as does New York City.
Right, and you've mentioned now two different states in a city. How reliable is data comparing one state to another or one city to another when when you see these sort of comparisons about what's safe and what isn't, what's a crime written place and what isn't.
Yeah, let me put it this way. You know, the FBI's role is they seek to standardize the data to the extent possible between cities so that you can make these comparisons insofar as they're possible to be made at all. But that can definitely be a little challenging. Even with that standardization. The one data point that we sort of know is accurate and reflects, you know, what is actually happening on the ground is murder. Because of the tragic
nature of defense. At the end of it, someone has lost their life, and that tends to be reported to many different authorities. So murder counts, murder rates tend to reflect the actual number of those offenses committed in a community. But the same might not be true of larceny. The same might not be true of burglary in all cases, you know I'm thinking of You know, I had my bike stolen in Brooklyn, and I certainly never told the
police that bike was gone. So those sort of challenges and reporting rate also might have an issue a way of confounding comparisons between jurisdictions, It's not impossible. Those comparisons are certainly meaningful, but they might not fully reflect facts on the ground. They might come close to it. More.
You mentioned murder again, and we started talking about murder in this happy episode we're having, and I wanted to ask you, given this spike in the homicide rate in twenty twenty, and it's cooled down subsequently, but it's still higher than it had been. What aren't we doing about homicide and violent crimes that could address that more directly?
That is the question. Two metrics that I've been thinking about, and I'm going to refer to the work of some other scholars in the process, are clearance rates and response times. So the clearance rate is you can think of it very roughly as the rate at which police solve an offense. So it's the ratio of crimes in which an arrest has been made or in which an arrest is impossible to the number of crimes that are actually reported to them.
So if you have four murders in a given year, and you make an arrest in three of them, your clearance rate is seventy five percent. Unfortunately, seventy five percent would be an outlier clearance rate in many cities in this country. We've seen clearance rates below fifty percent in some major cities, and in Chicago one year I think it was below thirty percent. That suggests that, you know, quite literally, people can get away with murder, and that's
very dispiriting, that's horrifying. I think we need to figure out exactly what's happening and see if we can figure out a way to increase clearance rates so people who commit these most serious of offenses are actually brought to justice. That's one factor. Anna Harvey, a researcher who I mentioned before, is also some thought into studying police response times, which in some jurisdictions can be quite high, and that also
can lead you a feeling of impunity. You know, if by the time police show up it's an hour later, it's much more difficult to solve that crime. So these are two statistics that feed into each other, but I don't want to talk exclusively about those two metrics. Another promising intervention we've seen is something called the community violence intervention programs. These are models where people from the community build nonprofit organizations and employ people from the community to
help stop violence before it starts. So a model that I've seen in Newark, New Jersey, which is quite near to me, you will see people who have experienced in the criminal justice system spend time in their communities, hear what's happening here about nascent fights that might be brewing, hear about conflicts that might be brewing, and then find the people affected by those conflicts and try to put a stop to it. Try to say, you know, I understand what you're going through, but violence is not the
solution here. These sort of programs, when they work, they are very effective. New York is one of very few cities that didn't see homicide rates in create appreciably in twenty twenty, for example. But they're very hard to get right, and they typically require more money and more professionalization and more staff than they're ever given. So this is a promising option that I'm glad to say. Here's another piece
of good news. The Biden administration has actually taking a serious interest and promoting and investing in ames.
I always like to ask guess what they've learned that is an aha or a new thing to them about the subject we're discussing. In your longtime observer of crime trends, what did you learn watching the way that crime statistics took shape in the early parts of the pandemic and where they are now and the kind of public debate we had around all of that.
That's a great question to think through. One thing I've learned is statistics don't always reflect people's experience. We actually see this in the economy as well. To bring it near to a topic that always care about. The data may show one thing, but people may feel another thing. So there's a real gap often between people's perceptions of safety and the actual data. And the reasons for that
may be really complicated. They may be because we've discussed the data don't quantify the offenses that people are actually worried about. But whatever the reason for that gap, we've just got to take people's perceptions seriously. And it is no answer to someone who's worried about their safety to say, well, technically crime is down. That's non answer. That's not an answer that helps bring us to a safer and more just place. Games.
We're out of time. Thank you for coming on today.
Thank you.
Ames Groward is an expert on crime statistics and Senior counsel at the Brennan Center for Justice at the NYU Law School. Here at Crash Course, we believe that collisions can be messy, impressive, challenging, surprising, and always instructive. In today's Crash Course, I learned that the perception of crime can almost be as influential for people as the reality of crime itself and has to be taken into consideration when we're coming up with policies to address crime. What
did you learn? We'd love to hear from you. You can tweak at the Bloomberg Opinion, handle at Opinion or me at Tim O'Brien using the hashtag Bloomberg Crash Course. You can also subscribe to our show wherever you're listening right now and leave us a review. It helps more people find the show. This episode was produced by the Indispensable and always Lawful Anna Maazarakis and me. Our supervising producer is Magnus Hendrickson, and we had editing help from Sagebauman,
Jeff Grocott, Mike Nize and Christine Vanden Bilart. Blake Maples does our sound engineering, and our original theme song was composed by Luis Gara. I'm Tim O'Brien. We'll be back next week with another Crash Course