Lies, damned lies, and competing crime statistics from AG Sessions and the Brennan Center

My news feed today brought me to two notable pieces that emphasized modern crime realities in two notably different ways:

The scary crime story comes via this USA Today op-ed authored by Attorney General Jeff Sessions, which begins with this sharp sentence: “Violent crime is surging in American cities.”  AG Sessions goes on to say this about current crime realities with a piece focused mostly on policing practices:

In Chicago, arrests have fallen 36% since 2014 to the lowest level in at least 16 years.  Last year, they fell in every major crime category, and they fell in every single district in the city.  To put that in perspective, out of more than 500 non-fatal shootings in early 2016, only seven resulted in any sort of arrest.  That’s 1%. Not surprisingly, as arrest rates plummeted in those years, the murder rate nearly doubled. Meanwhile in Baltimore, while arrests have fallen 45% in the past two years, homicides have risen 78%, and shootings have more than doubled.

Yet amid this plague of violence, too much focus has been placed on a small number of police who are bad actors rather than on criminals.  And too many people believe the solution is to impose consent decrees that discourage the proactive policing that keeps our cities safe….  When proactive policing declines and violent crime rises, minority communities get hit the hardest.  We will not sign consent decrees for political expediency that will cost more lives by handcuffing the police instead of the criminals. Every neighborhood needs to be safe and peaceful.

Our first priority must be to save lives, restore public safety, and bring back the community policing that we know works.  To help achieve those goals, the department, with the help of our federal, state and local law enforcement partners, will focus our efforts on thwarting violent crime, drug trafficking, and gun crime and gang violence.  If combating violent crime and restoring public safety are seen as dramatic reversals, then I fully support such a sea change.

The much more encouraging crime story comes via this new Brennan Center analysis of “Crime Trends: 1990-2016,” which is promoted with this reassuring first phrase: “Crime rates have dropped dramatically and remain near historic lows.” The Brennan Center analysis goes on to provide these “key findings” of modern crime realities in its executive summary:

Crime has dropped precipitously in the last quarter-century. While crime may fall in some years and rise in others, annual variations are not indicative of long-term trends. While murder rates have increased in some cities, this report finds no evidence that the hard-won public safety gains of the last two and a half decades are being reversed….

The violent crime rate also peaked in 1991 at 716 violent crimes per 100,000, and now stands at 366, about half that rate. However, the violent crime rate, like rates of murder and overall crime, has risen and fallen during this time.  For example, violent crime registered small increases in 2005 and 2006, and then resumed its downward trend.  In 2015, violent crime increased by 2.9 percent nationally and by 2.0 percent in the nation’s 30 largest cities. Preliminary data for 2016 also show a greater increase in the national violent crime rate, up 6.3 percent, and a smaller jump in the 30 largest cities, 2.4 percent. Crime is often driven by local factors, so rates in cities may differ from national averages.

From 1991 to 2016, the murder rate fell by roughly half, from 9.8 killings per 100,000 to 5.3. The murder rate rose last year by an estimated 7.8 percent. With violence at historic lows, modest increases in the murder rate may appear large in percentage terms. Similarly, murder rates in the 30 largest cities increased by 13.2 percent in 2015 and an estimated 14 percent in 2016. These increases were highly concentrated. More than half of the 2015 urban increase (51.8 percent) was caused by just three cities, Baltimore, Chicago, and Washington, D.C. And Chicago alone was responsible for 43.7 percent of the rise in urban murders in 2016….

The data demonstrate that crime rates and trends vary widely from city to city. In New York, for example, crime remains at all-time lows. Other cities, such as Washington, D.C., have seen murder rise and then fall recently, yet the rate is still lower than it was a decade ago. However, there are a small group of cities, such as Chicago, where murder remains persistently high, even by historical standards.