When President Biden walks to the podium to deliver the State of the Union on Thursday, he plans to celebrate large drops in crime over the past year, but that’s not the experience of people living in high-crime cities such as Washington, Memphis and Dallas.
The progress in bringing down crime rates also hasn’t reduced violent crime to pre-pandemic levels.
In the past week, Mr. Biden has gone on the offensive against Republicans who say policies endorsed by him and fellow Democrats have sparked a national crime wave. He held two events last week aimed at changing the narrative about crime, including a meeting with big city police chiefs at the White House and making a trip to the southern border.
The crux of Mr. Biden’s argument is a crime analysis by AH Datalytics that revealed an 11.8% drop in homicides nationally from 2022 to 2023. The research also found that rapes, robberies and aggravated assaults declined in 2023 compared to a year earlier.
If those numbers hold as the FBI collects more data about 2023 from U.S. cities, it would be the largest single-year drop in homicides since at least 1960. The FBI will release the official 2023 crime statistics sometime in the fall.
However, the double-digit decrease is less impressive considering that homicides in major cities remain dramatically higher than before the pandemic when violent crime spiked.
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Research from the non-partisan Council for Criminal Justice reported a similar decline in homicides between 2022 and 2023. But it also found that homicides were up 18% last year compared to 2019.
According to the council’s analysis, other violent crimes followed the same pattern:
• Gun assaults were down 10% between 2022 and 2023 but were still 42% higher than in 2019.
• Aggravated assaults by 3% last year from the year earlier but were up 8% from 2019.
• Carjackings fell by 9% between 2022 and 2023 but were up a whopping 93% compared to 2019.
“Is the White House putting out correct crime statistics? It is correct based on a substack of data that an individual has put together for 2023. Is it a full picture of crime in the United States? No,” said University of Miami criminology professor Alex Piquero, a former director of the Bureau of Justice Statistics under Mr. Biden.
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Jeff Asher, who co-founded AH Datalytics, concedes that homicides in 2023 were up by more than double digits from 2019, but he said the focus should be on the dramatic decline in recent years.
“I’m of the belief we should compare data to the recent yesterday,” he said. “The sharp decline from 2022 weighs more heavily for me than that it’s still up relative to 2019.”
Crime is a heavily localized phenomenon, and criminologists caution against painting a broad national picture based on data from individual cities. A handful of cities with 200 murders per year showed staggering increases in homicide last year.
The District of Columbia recorded a 36% increase in murders last year compared to 2022, while homicides jumped 27% in Memphis, 15% in Dallas and 7% in Kansas City during the same period, according to AH Datalytics’ numbers.
St. Louis and Baltimore both recorded roughly 20% declines in homicides, but their total murders are still among the highest in the nation.
“If you look at D.C., Memphis, and Oakland, no one is going to tell you crime is down,” Mr. Piquero said. “That might be true for a subset of cities at the national level, but not for those three cities.”
Even cities boasting about sharp declines in homicides last year still have numbers well above 2019 levels. Murders in Chicago, for example, dropped by 13% between 2023 and 2022, but are still 23% higher than in 2019, according to city data.
Philadelphia reported a 20% decline in homicides last year compared to the previous year, but they are still 16% above pre-pandemic levels.
The mixed results haven’t stopped Mr. Biden and his Democratic allies from taking credit for the decline and depicting the president as a crime-stopper who reversed the carnage from 2020.
Flanked by police chiefs last week, Mr. Biden said his administration chose “progress over politics and communities across the country are safer as a result of that policy.”
“Our plan is working,” Mr. Biden said.
Sen. Christopher Murphy, Connecticut Democrat, noted in a tweet last week that violent crime is down by “near record levels.” Last month, he linked Mr. Biden’s bipartisan gun bill to a 12% drop in homicides, though criminologists dismissed that idea.
“There is no way you can say that this law had any effect on crime because that means it would have had to affect crime in Memphis, Oakland and D.C., where it’s on the rise,” Mr. Piquero said. “You can’t say it affected nine cities and not the other five.”
The Biden administration maintains the crime decrease is because its $1.9 trillion COVID-19 relief package boosted funding for local police departments while also creating job opportunities for youth in underserved communities.
Money from the relief package helped Detroit hire 200 additional officers, Milwaukee boosted its gun crime investigations and Chicago bolstered its community violence intervention programs.
During the event last week, Mr. Biden took a shot at Republicans who opposed the relief package dubbed the American Rescue Plan, suggesting they stood in the way of his efforts to reduce crime.
Yet, Mr. Biden’s remarks were overshadowed by the killing of nursing student Laken Riley and other shocking crimes allegedly committed by illegal immigrants. Federal authorities have charged a Venezuelan immigrant who was in the country illegally with Riley’s murder while a man charged with murdering a two-year-old boy in Maryland and a man who shot police officers in the District were also in the country illegally.
Republicans, including presumptive presidential nominee Donald Trump, have seized on the headlines to make the claim Mr. Biden’s lax immigration policies have fueled a crime wave.
The cases have become a flashpoint in the immigration and crime debates. And voters are concerned.
Despite the violent crime drop from 2022, 63% of Americans say the crime problem in the U.S. is either extremely or very serious, up from 54% in 2021, according to a Gallup poll released late last year. More than 77% of Americans say there is more crime in the U.S. in 2023 than there was in 2022, the poll found.
Criminologists debate the reasons why crime plummeted. One reason is the world is more stable than it was during the height of the pandemic. The stressors of the pandemic have receded. As part of the COVID-19 lockdowns, some cities shut down their intervention programs, which have since been restored.
Also in 2020, calls to defund the police were on the rise. Some argue that caused the police to pull back from enforcing the law, but others argue that relatively few cities slashed budgets.
Mr. Asher said it’s “absolutely reasonable” to expect crime to reach pre-pandemic numbers.
“Property crime fell in 2020 and 2021 and violent crime has been stable,” he said. “We should continue to try to learn what works and celebrate success.”
Ernesto Lopez, a research specialist at the Council for Criminal Justice, said politicians have made 2019 the flashpoint, but they should look at 2013 and 2014, when crime was at historical lows.
“Regardless of the political rhetoric, we are not where we were a decade ago and that’s not ancient history,” he said. “There needs to be a serious conversation about how we get back to where we were because it wasn’t that long ago we were at a historic low.”
• Jeff Mordock can be reached at jmordock@washingtontimes.com.