“Crime rates are improving. Too bad crime data is not.”

The title of this post is the headline of this new Washington Post editorial.  Here are excerpts:

There’s encouraging news about crime rates in the United States. After a spike in both violent crime and property offenses after the pandemic-and-protest year of 2020, statistics show that crime is reverting to 2019 levels. That’s according to a newly released midyear report by the Council on Criminal Justice, a nonpartisan think tank, based on monthly offense rates for 12 violent, property and drug crimes in 39 cities that have consistently reported such data over the past six years….

Even with the recent improvements, it is undeniable that crime, including the worst crime — homicide — spiked nationally in recent years. The trauma and insecurity that this caused lingers. In seven U.S. cities that provide data on carjacking, that offense remains 68 percent more frequent than it was in the first half of 2019, according to CCJ’s report. Shoplifting and car theft also remain at elevated levels.

Given the emotions that inevitably swirl around this subject, public opinion will probably never precisely reflect statistical reality. But at least the government could publish a sufficiently precise and up-to-date picture of statistical reality. Unfortunately, it does not, as another recent CCJ report explained. The lead federal source for national data, the FBI, issues annual reports each October based on numbers gathered up to 18 months previously and reported — voluntarily and with varying degrees of accuracy — to the bureau by some 18,000 police agencies….

In an age of social media and viral video, the government should be able to update the public on crime at least as often as, say, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reports on inflation or unemployment — that is, monthly.  Even reports based on a representative sample of jurisdictions would be an improvement over the status quo.

And yet the FBI’s new incident-reporting platform, intended to improve data quality, has made it more time-consuming and complex for police departments to send information to Washington. It has proven especially difficult for small, local agencies, nearly half of which have 10 or fewer officers on staff….

The Bureau of Justice Statistics gets less money from Congress than almost any other federal statistical agency. Last fiscal year, the bureau received $35 million, far less than the $78 million President Biden had requested and less than the $42 million it received the year prior.  The Bureau of Labor Statistics, by contrast, received $698 million.  Private groups such as CCJ do important work with their limited resources, as its latest report on crime trends, despite unavoidable data limitations, shows.  Keeping citizens fully informed about crime is a public responsibility, however. It deserves public resources to match.