Lying about crime statistics 🤥

Anything that Trump does not agree with must be a conspiracy to lie with statistics, says Trump. But I’m incredulous about such claims.

Police officers have very little reason to say crime is lower than it really is. Usually when crime is high, politicians allocate more not less resources to police departments. Rarely are police departments blamed for high crime – usually that blame is ascribed to politicians – and the solutions called for to reduce crime usually make police officers jobs easier.

It’s not to say it’s easy to compare one city’s crime level to another accurately. Each community has different laws, policies and moral standards that define crime. Even if you only look at crime universally agreed as bad like pre-mediated murder, you have issues like abortion. Different communities have different levels of marginalization of minorities and different levels of desperation by citizens who lack jobs and mental health care. Indeed, I suspect much of the south’s high murder rates is not due to guns but racial strife.

Ideally the federal government would require consistent reporting of crime beyond what is currently reported but there are tens of thousands of different law enforcement agencies in America. But better tracking of crime would be good not just for interested citizens and sociologists but also policymakers. Still every community is different and it’s hard to argue that a top down approach would be effective at reducing crime when it’s certain to require a much more diverse and local community level solutions to crime.