Patchwork: America’s Uneven System for Reporting Crime Statistics

Crime is down in America’s cities—or so our longstanding system for national crime reporting tells us. Claiming that those numbers lie, the Trump Administration has deployed swarms of federal agents and National Guardsmen to urban centers across the nation it claims are ravaged with crime. At the administration’s bidding, the office of the U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia has launched an investigation into the accuracy of Washington, D.C.’s crime statistics, which show a marked drop in crime since the Covid-19 pandemic. Some Washington police officers have assisted in the federal probe, pleading good-faith concerns that the District’s policymakers have quietly reclassified certain types of incidents to avoid having to report them as “violent crime” occurrences. More broadly, across America anywhere from a quarter to a third of municipalities do not report their crime data to the federal government, raising questions as to the accuracy and utility of the FBI’s data set. Such debates over crime statistics have raged far beyond Washington and long before the Trump administration. Quelling this smoldering problem demands more: a standardized, nationally mandated system for reporting and classifying crime statistics.

The current moment is hardly the first in which the White House has inaccurately cited crime statistics to pursue an aggressive agenda. Richard Nixon and his administration inflated and fudged numbers in order to target left-leaning groups and Black Americans, as later admitted by Nixon’s advisor John Ehrlichman: “[W]e could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course, we did.” Ronald Reagan continued Nixon’s bellicose stance on crime while trotting out the same types of hackneyed stereotypes and dishonest accounting of crime rates. Reagan’s presidency oversaw a major rise in the number of imprisoned Americans; however, when adjusted for changes in America’s age structure, the Reagan era ultimately saw little to no decrease in crime rates. And under Bill Clinton, the misleading and later-debunked term “superpredator,” coined from statistics showing that a fraction of Philadelphia’s juveniles committed an outsize number of crimes, helped spawn a moral panic that coalesced into the deeply controversial 1994 crime bill.

The history of reported, nation-spanning crime statistics stretches back longer than one might expect: as early as the 1920s, the International Association of Chiefs of Police established the Committee on Uniform Crime Records to recommend classifications for crimes. Criteria examined by the committee included severity, frequency, nationwide spread, and the chance that the police would actually be informed of the crime. The committee’s representations, made in 1929, served as the basis for the Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR) Program still in use today. The following year, Congress passed legislation permitting the Attorney General to collect crime statistics; that year, 400 cities across 43 states joined the UCR Program. Today, the UCR Program relies on voluntary reporting—which it receives from over 18,000 law enforcement agencies, ranging from cities to colleges to tribes.

The decision to classify a given incident as one type of crime or another—including whether a given incident was a “violent” one—is typically made not at the FBI, but at the local level by beat cops and their supervisors. In other words, crime reporting is typically driven by police, not politicians. But Washington is one jurisdiction where the local police department has been riven by internal debates about how crimes should be classified, and where the recent creation of new categories of crimes has sparked controversy. Crime statistics show violent crime down 10% in Washington between 2023 and 2024, against a 13% drop nationally. Some District cops take issue with the minutiae of these statistics, however, alleging this decrease is not a result of actual curbs on crime but is driven by tweaks to terminology. They note that the D.C. City Council legislated a new category of crime, endangerment with a firearm, which covered situations in which a suspect discharged a weapon in public without necessarily aiming it at anyone. Unlike assault with a dangerous weapon, endangerment with a firearm is not reported as a violent crime. However, of more than 150 incidents which police flagged as being incorrectly classified, only seven alleged endangerment with a firearm, suggesting that novel terminology is not a major driver of the statistical drop in violent crimes. Most disagreements stemmed from familiar terms: the difference between robbery and theft, or whether a “deadly weapon” was involved, for example.

The problem is deeper. Criminologists note that for “[r]esearchers and statisticians working with multi-jurisdictional crime data … no comprehensive standard currently exists” regarding how certain offenses should be categorized. Comparisons between different jurisdictions are also hampered by the differing nature of city limits. Some cities, such as Washington, contain only dense urban areas within their boundaries; others, such as Houston, Texas, report lower crime rates owing to large swathes of suburban and rural land within their city limits. Myriad law enforcement agencies are also spread across multiple cities or counties, which have different terms or categories of crime. Some crimes are not even reported by uniformed police; private entities like the Mall of America and Disney World command sizable private security forces, which in many cases assume the role of law enforcement but are not accountable to the same records and reporting laws.

America’s system of reporting crime statistics is thus muddled by several problems, including fractured jurisdictions, a lack of formal standards, differences of opinion as to where to draw the line between non-violent and violent crime, and, for a sizable minority of law enforcement agencies across the country, a refusal to report. Crime statistics, despite these structural challenges, are a crucial tool for policymakers and citizens. It is clear that weaponization of these statistics, while a problem with a long history, might be cured somewhat by the resolution of some of these structural issues. We should endeavor to create a top-down, nationwide standard for the classification of crimes and require that they be reported.