Note from Radley: This is a cross-post from the Unpopulist, a terrific publication that focuses on populism and authoritarianism. I highly recommend you subscribe. It’s free!

by Ashley Rubin

Donald Trump has not been shy about his strategy for reelection: every opportunity he gets—at his rallies and speeches, during media appearances and even the presidential debate—Trump depicts America as a nation beset by an out-of-control crime wave enabled by Democratic policies. But his stark portrayals do not match the actual crime problem. At this point, American crime rates are at worst stable, resuming pre-2020 levels, and at best falling, consistent with a longer pattern of declining crime rates since the 1990s.

For Trump, railing about the scourge of “migrant crime,” “drug cartels,” “gang violence,” “violent criminals,” and unsafe cities—especially “Democrat-run” ones—is a way to justify an unprecedented crackdown on groups he doesn’t like, such as the mentally ill, the homeless, immigrants, and criminals. It’s also a tactic intended to scare voters into supporting him. But it’s more than just an electoral strategy: Over the last decade that Trump has been building this narrative, he’s been unraveling the hard-won, cross-party consensus for criminal justice reform in pursuit of previously abandoned policies. (Yes, he passed the First Step Act sentencing reform under pressure from Jared Kushner, his son-in-law, but subsequently regretted it.)

Exploiting crime for political purposes is a storied tradition in American politics. But Trump is unique in that he has weaponized and been hyper-alarmist about it precisely in an era that has seen historically low crime rates.

Manufacturing a problem

In the second half of the 20th century, a number of presidential candidates used fear of crime to get elected. This strategy was historically specific: In the late 1960s, U.S. crime rates skyrocketed and remained fairly high, bouncing around from year to year until the early 1990s when they came crashing down. For politicians eager to fight the gains made by the Civil Rights Movement, crime became a useful vehicle to target behavior they found threatening. Their tough-on-crime rhetoric made sense in these three decades that saw extremely high crime rates, even if politicians used questionable and often racialized means to address the issue. So successful was this strategy that it persisted for a decade after crime rates fell dramatically, returning to mid-century levels.

But by the 2000s, this trend had eased. Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama rarely spoke about crime. With the crime rate down to normal levels, politicians could approach the issue more clear-eyed than they had in decades. Focused on terrorist threats and war abroad, Bush went so far as to inaugurate prison reforms at home. From about 2008 to 2015, bipartisan coalitions condemned tough-on-crime politics as too costly, ineffective, and unjust and decided mass incarceration needed to end. They started to move away from crime policies that disproportionately affected people of color. The national incarceration rate began its first decline in decades after peaking in 2008 and by 2015, criminologists began debating whether we were witnessing the end of mass incarceration.

But in the last three elections, Trump, who has sought to define himself as the “law and order” candidate, borrowing from strategies used by Republicans in the 1960s and 1980s and eventually Democrats in the 1990s, has reversed all that and reinjected crime into the national consciousness.

Trump regularly asserts, without evidence, that America is overrun with crime and that its cities aren’t safe. But instead of parsing actual data, he points to high-profile cases—a strategy with an ignoble track record, as the infamous Willie Horton example from 1988 attests—or he scaremongers about Hannibal Lecter-like criminals. Other Republicans have followed Trump’s lead. But the fact is that since Trump arrived on the political scene, and particularly since 2016, it is not actual crime, but rhetoric about crime that has made it an issue again. Setting aside a few, short-term exceptions that began during Trump’s own presidency, crime rates have been coming down since they peaked in 1991.

In the real world, crime is falling

Before giving a fuller account of the crime rate, let me explain how criminologists like me make sense of the data and how we know that crime is down.

Annual crime data, compiled by the Bureau of Justice Statistics, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, typically have a one- to three-year lag. Currently, we have national and state-level data through 2023. For a less comprehensive but more up-to-date look, we can also find smaller reports, like the annual, mid-year, and quarterly reports issued by the Major Cities Chiefs Association, summarizing data from fewer jurisdictions.

These various reports sometimes disagree because they rely on different data sources (such as crimes reported to the police and victimization surveys). For example, some sources show violent crime went down in 2020 and others show it went up, which affects our characterization of subsequent years. National compilers also face several difficulties including some jurisdictions’ failure to report in some years (requiring subsequent adjustments to the data to ensure apples-to-apples comparisons). Also, different jurisdictions define certain crimes differently (such as hate crimes), leading to reporting differences across compilations, years, and jurisdictions. Finally, data compilers’ numbers are often updated, as data entry errors are discovered and as law enforcement departments retroactively add other, newly processed cases of older crimes. For these reasons, it is a good idea to look at multiple sources to understand the crime rates.

Importantly, while we tend to talk about a single crime rate (“crime is out of control”), there’s not really one crime rate. Crime rates vary from place to place—just as New York City was experiencing a major wave of Covid deaths in 2020 while many other jurisdictions were having far more modest waves. Likewise, crime data are typically broken down by type of crime (property crime versus violent crime, homicide versus other kinds of crimes, or “index” crimes—a list of eight serious crimes we treat as a general indicator of overall crime). And these rates don’t always act the same—sometimes one is up and another is down.

Making sense of the data

As a criminologist, I look for multi-year patterns in any given jurisdiction or combination of jurisdictions, rather than focusing on whether the rates are up or down that year. That’s because crime rates normally fluctuate from year to year—this standard statistical variation or “noise” in the data is normal and expected. A short-term increase isn’t cause for alarm. A multi-year increase is. Likewise, a short-term decrease isn’t grounds to pat ourselves on the back. When politicians and the media make a big fuss about whether the crime rate that year is up or down, they tend to lose sight of these longer-term trends. The exception is if we see a really big spike in a given crime rate—something out of the norm from the typical up-and-down, so that we know it’s not just noise but instead is “significant.” That can be a sign we need to pay closer attention to what’s going on.

What do the most recent crime data actually tell us? As we’ll see, crime, including violent crime, is mostly down, according to various short-term assessments and since the peaks experienced early in the pandemic. But those peaks were historically exceptional: there was a brief and significant jump in the murder rate and other violent crimes during the first two years of the Covid epidemic—and notably this increase began before Trump lost the 2020 election. Since the pandemic, however, even the murder rate has been falling, according to multiple sources.

But since crime generally increased during the early years of the pandemic, a decrease afterwards is a welcome but not entirely meaningful development. That’s because a decrease from a peak can still be quite high. Instead, we should ask: Where does the decrease put us, historically? Taking a longer view, we’re getting back to where crime has been, roughly speaking, over the last 10 years—that is, still far lower than it used to be last century.

Since pundits and politicians are focusing on short-term assessments, let’s start there. According to the FBI’s latest comprehensive yearly report, nationwide, violent crime (overall) decreased (3%) in 2023, as did the homicide rate (11.6%), the rape rate (9.4%), the robbery rate (0.3%), and the aggravated assault rate (2.8%). These numbers are not terribly significant, but many will be reassured to see them going in the right direction and not, as Trump has been suggesting, the other way.

The FBI’s crime rate calculations have been the center of controversy because its 2022 figures were updated from a 1.7% decrease in violent crime to an 4.9% increase. Although updates are typical (as noted above), and neither figure is significant (meaning both numbers are consistent with standard annual fluctuations), the Trump campaign touted this flip as vindication and proof that crime is out of control under the Biden-Harris administration. As a FactCheck.org assessment concluded, “Even with the revisions, however, the 2022—and 2023—figures for violent crime, and murder specifically, are lower than the figures for 2020.”

The FBI data are based on reports from law enforcement agencies and thus exclude those crimes that go unreported. We get a more complete picture from the BJS, which relies on both victimization surveys and crimes reported to the police.

According to the BJS’s latest report, violent victimization in 2023 was down slightly, but insignificantly so—and notably at levels similar to where the violent victimization rates were before 2020. Looking to reported crimes, they find slight annual fluctuations but a historically flat trend: “The rate of violent victimization reported to police was consistent from 2022 to 2023 (10.1 per 1,000 persons). The 2023 rate was higher than the 2020 (6.6 per 1,000) and 2021 (7.5 per 1,000) rates but was comparable to 5 years ago in 2019 and consistent with the overall downward trend since 1993 (33.8 per 1,000).”

According to this year’s Major Cities Chiefs Association mid-year report, which, like the FBI, relies on reported violent crimes, homicide, rape, robbery, and aggravated assault are all down slightly. Of course, this varied from city to city—for example, Chicago saw a drop in its number of homicides in 2024 from the year before, while Louisville saw a slight increase. While the Major Cities Chiefs Association reports provide counts rather than rates (which account for population change), we can see that the violent crime rate is coming back down to pre-2020 figures.

Other crime analysts have issued their findings for 2023 and 2024, again showing short-term decreases in violent crime rates, including the murder rate. Likewise, an FBI snapshot of the first quarter of 2024 again shows across-the-board declines in violent crime compared to the first quarter of 2023. Most of these changes are not significant; instead, they are consistent with the year-to-year fluctuations. But they are generally down, which is also consistent with the general trend of falling violent crime rates based on varying indicators in recent years.

Basically, the rates are getting back to the long-term pattern of falling and eventually plateauing violent crime rates. Said differently, crime rates in recent years are fairly unremarkable—and still quite low compared to the multi-decade highs the country experienced late last century.

The lies are working

Still, Trump’s evidence-free rhetoric has managed to convince his supporters that violent crime is a major problem. A recent Gallup poll found that three of the five most important issues according to Republican and Republican-leaning independent voters—crime, immigration, and terrorism and national security—are connected to the broader issue of crime. But it’s not just Trump’s supporters—voters in general now care more about crime, even as the crime rates are falling and remain low, historically speaking.

As sociologist Katherine Beckett has demonstrated, the more politicians talk about crime, the more the media talks about crime, and the more citizens become concerned about crime—even when actual crime rates show crime is not the problem citizens think it is.

Trump’s promise to “stop crime and restore safety” sounds good to those voters who believe the hype that violent crime is at historically high levels (it’s not) and that we are in the middle of a crime wave (we’re not), and who believe that Harris plans to gut police departments in order to let violent criminals run free (she doesn’t). The effect is that those who challenge Trump’s depiction of a dangerous America get characterized as being soft on crime or enabling criminality.

Ultimately, by convincing the public that crime is a real threat, Trump isn’t just trying to delegitimize his opponents. He’s also paving the way for the public to accept unnecessary and harmful policy changes that don’t meaningfully bring the crime rate down but help him purge society—whether through deportation or incarceration—of the people he believes shouldn’t be in it.

Ashley Rubin is a social scientist at the University of Hawai’i