Can mainstream news be trusted? According to CNN and ABC violent crime is falling in the US.

Don’t believe it.

It’s not reasonable that violent crime would fall in the US since violent crime in Canada has jumped by 37 % from 2021 to 2022. And a whopping 55% since 2013!

The United States is overrun with illegals storming across the border, who are immediately released by progressive district attorneys when they are accused of serious crimes, including crimes like rape and assault. Contributing to the chaos are the destructive education policies of large corrupt Democrat-controlled cities. If that is not enough, demoralized police departments have been struggling with slashed budgets and early retirements in the wake of the “defund the police” movement.

To find out what is actually happening, we must dig deeper

The mainstream media blindly rely upon FBI crime reports. Unfortunately, their trust is unwarranted because FBI crime reports have serious problems.

John Lott, the founder of the Crime Prevention Research Center (CPRC), has carefully examined violent crime statistics and explains why the FBI reports are grossly misleading. Here is a summary of his analyses which are posted on the CPRC website.

The US has two independent sources of national crime statistics: the FBI’s Uniform Crime Reporting system, which gathers the number of crimes reported to police departments, and the Bureau of Justice Statistics, which conducts the National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS). The NCVS asks 240,000 people a year whether they have been victims of a crime.

The two measures have long conflicted, but they have diverged even more widely since 2020: The FBI reports less violent crime, while, in the NCVS, more people say they have been victims. For example, between 2021 and 2022, the FBI Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR) showed reported violent crime fell by 2.1%, but the NCVS showed reported violent crime increased by 29.3%. As shown in the chart, the two measures rarely move together as far back as 2008.

Why do the NCVS and the FBI UCR diverge?

The disagreement is due to several reasons. First, the share of reporting departments has fallen like a rock since 2019. As the Washington Examiner notes: “In 2019, 89% of agencies covering 97% of the population submitted data, but by 2021, that coverage plummeted to less than 63% of departments overseeing just 65% of the population.”

Adding to the FBI’s problems, crimes are undercounted in larger cities, such as Baltimore and Nashville. As this chart shows, in 2022, only 44% fully participated and just 23% partially participated. It’s no wonder the FBI stats do not reflect reality.

The FBI statistics have still more problems due to their reliance on police reports. Not only have police department failed to report fully to the FBI, the police are failing to arrest and charge criminals. Since 2019, there has been a dramatic drop in arrest rates. The plunge has been particularly impressive in large Democrat-run cities, where arrests for violent crimes has crashed from 42% to just 20%. Exacerbating this decline is the drop in reporting crime to police. Unsurprisingly, when the public knows police aren’t arresting criminals, fewer people are willing to report crimes to the police.

Can mainstream news be trusted?

Media claims that violent crime rates are falling are betrayed by their reliance on the grievously flawed FBI UCR system. The collapse in the numbers of police departments reporting to the FBI, as well as the public’s decreasing willingness to report crimes, undercuts any possible faith in the FBI reports.

Such superficial reporting is probably just due to general incompetence, but I am not willing to ignore possible bias either. Are the media the handmaidens for the Democrats?

Claims made by the mainstream media can’t be trusted. But you knew that already.