A surge in rapes, muggings and shootings has taken hold in American cities since 2019, according to an analysis of federal data, and researchers say the violence is a product of Democratic officials’ anti-cop, pro-criminal policies enacted after the police killing of George Floyd.

The number of city dwellers who reported being the victim of a nonfatal violent crime shot up over 40% between 2019 and 2023, according to the Justice Department’s National Crime Victimization Survey released this fall.

When the DOJ excluded simple assault — the lowest level, most common felony — from its survey responses, the victimization rate in urban areas jumped to an over 54% increase in that same period.

Property crime similarly worsened, with households seeing a 26% increase in burglaries and other thefts from 2019 to 2023. The federal survey does not include data on business-related property crime, so the smash-and-grab robberies and rampant shoplifting seen in most metropolises aren’t factored into its findings.

The crime surge is a phenomenon confined to cities across the country, the analysis showed, as people living in rural and suburban parts of the U.S. reported little change in how often they had to duck gunfire or were targeted in brutish stickups.

Veteran crime statistician Jeff Anderson, who first spotted the spike in urban crime rates in the federal data that was made public in September, said “leftist ideologues” working as top prosecutors are behind the rift.

He said the prosecutors’ inclination to forgive criminal behavior and harp on police procedures, especially after the “defund the police” movement that came about from Floyd’s murder in 2020, explains the difference between places such as New York City, Chicago and Los Angeles, and their neighbors living outside city lines.

“They’ve adopted a very constrained view of policing, and they decided to rerun the experiments of years ago about what happens if we go soft on crime — I think we’re seeing the result,” said Mr. Anderson, who is the former director of the Bureau of Justice Statistics and now runs the American Main Street Initiative think tank.

The federal crime survey is conducted annually by the Census Bureau and includes responses from roughly 240,000 Americans.

Census takers interview people, often in person, about whether they have been the victim of “nonfatal personal crimes,” including rape, sexual assault, robbery, both aggravated and simple assault, and invasive thefts such as purse snatching and pickpocketing.

Most respondents — 45% — said they didn’t report their crimes to police, which the BJS said was comparable to the rate it was in 2019.

Mr. Anderson said the survey results run counter to the White House narrative that crime rates are down in the U.S.

In September, the FBI’s comprehensive annual Crime in the Nation report — a separate report most often cited by the Biden administration — had violent crime in the nation down 3% from 2022 to 2023.

And in the agency’s most recent Quarterly Uniform Crime Report, which covers January through June of this year, the FBI said violent crime fell 10% and property crime fell 13% throughout the country when compared to the same time period last year.

President Biden celebrated the FBI’s quarterly numbers earlier this fall by pointing out that the year-over-year drop in homicides happened at “record speed.”

“These record decreases follow the historic declines in crime in 2023, including the largest-ever decrease in the homicide rate,” Mr. Biden said. “Communities across our country are safer now than when I took office.”

But crime observers called out the FBI’s numbers for their lack of precision, as The Washington Times previously reported.

For example, the agency recorded 499 homicides in Chicago last year, while the professional police organization Major Cities Chiefs Association recorded 617 killings. Other big cities, such as Dallas and Baltimore, had sizable gaps in what the FBI reported and what the MCCA reported as well.

The FBI typically pushes out preliminary data that is quietly revised in the months and even years that follow.

John Lott from the Crime Prevention Research Center shared that the agency updated its 2021 and 2022 numbers this fall. 

The FBI originally reported that crime dropped 1.7% nationally from 2021 to 2022, but as the data firmed up, it now reports that crime increased 4.5% across the country.  

Mr. Anderson, the former BJS director, said the FBI is not the statistical agency for the Justice Department, so relying on them to provide concrete data is “a little bit of a reach.”

That point is emphasized by the agency’s shift to a more granular reporting protocol in 2021, which caused some local police departments to file incomplete numbers to the FBI or simply opt out of submitting data altogether.  

Mr. Anderson said the dramatic changes in the federal survey’s victimization rate warrant more attention than it’s getting, especially from media outlets that have cited the FBI’s crime numbers to defang former President Donald Trump’s talking points about crime in big cities.

“We can see from the NCVS that there is this massive crime spike in urban areas,” he said. “The press is busy reporting this 3% drop in crime from the FBI, and that’s just an estimate that is by no means exact, and they’re ignoring a 40% increase in violent crime. That’s a huge change.”

• Matt Delaney can be reached at mdelaney@washingtontimes.com.