Crime, Trump’s Claims and The Facts

With the arrival of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, Milwaukee’s homicides and non-fatal shootings spiked and continued to go up, before dramatically declining over the last two years.  As the next graph shows, Milwaukee had 98 homicides in 2019, which then more than doubled, reaching 215 in 2022.

Non-fatal shootings followed a similar track. Starting with 442 shootings in 2019, they topped out at 876 in 2022.

However, data for 2023 and 2024 show a big decline. The number of homicides decreased by 20% in 2023 and 23% in 2024. Non-fatal shootings shrank by 4% in 2023 and 24% in 2024.

The Milwaukee Police Department’s Dashboard shows declines in most other major crimes as well, as the next graph shows. In all cases, however, the declines are far more modest than those for homicides and non-fatal shootings. None comes close to the dramatic declines in gun crime.

The graph shows several exceptions to the declining major crime story. The most prominent of these is the increase in carjackings, apparently driven by the discovery that two car brands are easy to steal.

This pattern is not unique to Milwaukee. It is shared by much of the rest of the nation. The graph below shows the number of homicides in the United States since the year 2000. Again, this analysis finds that murders took a substantial jump in 2020, but then declined in 2023 and 2024.

(This graph is based on data from the statistics website AH Datalytics, which tracks murders in 277 cities. It estimates a 14.1% decline in homicides between 2023 and 2024 for the US.)

In the runup to the recent election, former president Donald Trump made crime a key issue. At several rallies he claimed, “There’s been a 43% increase in violent crimes since I left office.” How does that claim comport with the evidence from Milwaukee and the rest of the nation?

There are two models for assessing crime data. One consists of getting data from law enforcement agencies around the country. The National Incident-Based Reporting System (NIBRS), managed by the FBI, follows this model. It is also the model used by AH Datalytics, which taps directly into sites maintained by police department and other law enforcement agencies.

The federal government also runs a second program to assess the state of crime, called the National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS). It is maintained by the Bureau of Justice Statistics in the Justice Department, but separate from the FBI. The NCVS contacts a sample of the population and asks them whether they have been the victim of non-fatal violence, such as “personal crimes, including rape and sexual assault, robbery, aggravated and simple assault, and personal larceny.” It also looks at household property crimes, such as burglary and trespassing, motor vehicle theft, and other types of theft. It includes both crimes reported and not reported to the police.

The next graph shows the violent victimization rate per 1,000 persons aged 12 or over as a green line. A look at the numbers explains why Trump chose the victimization survey to assess the state of crime in the United States. This survey found a victimization rate of 16.4 for 2020, Trump’s last year in office, compared to 23.5 in 2022, Joe Biden’s second year. Dividing the two numbers gives the 43% increase in crime that Trump claims.

For comparison, I added the murder rate, shown in purple. Generally, the two indices track each other. However, in 2020 the two indices diverge. The homicide rate jumps up while the victimization rate declines in 2020, only to increase later.

It is not entirely clear why the two indices diverge. One factor is that victims of homicide cannot be included in the victimization survey. Another is that the victimization survey includes crimes that weren’t reported to police. A third factor is that we still don’t have the victimization figures for 2024, which may have found a further decline.

Politifact concluded that “by focusing only on this data point (the 43% increase in victimization)… Trump has cherry-picked the one finding that shows crime rising under the current administration,” and rated Trump’s statement Mostly False.

What the crime figures together show is that crime has gone down tremendously since the early 1990s, only to bump up during the pandemic, and then begin declining again in 2022. It’s a far more complicated — and more positive picture — than Trump presented.