Biden-Harris admin says crime is down, but independent data shows violent crime up across 66 cities
While the Biden-Harris administration touts preliminary data published last week from a coalition of cities as evidence of reduced violent crime under its watch, a crime data expert tells Fox News Digital his analysis of crime reporting data shows violent crime is actually increasing compared to levels prior to the COVID-19 pandemic.
"Americans are safer today than when Vice President Harris and I took office," according to President Biden's office in a statement. "We can’t stop now. That’s why I will continue to urge Congress to fund 100,000 additional police officers and crime prevention and community violence intervention programs, and make commonsense gun safety reforms such as a ban on assault weapons."
The Major Cities Chiefs Association (MCCA), which has been publishing year-by-year data stats on crime in 69 major cities across America since 2014, has released a preliminary data set showing violent crime levels dropped from January to June 2023 compared to 2024 levels, with 3,124 violent crime incidents in 2024, down from 3,783 in 2023.
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Laura Cooper, executive director for MCCA, told Fox News Digital they request violent crime data from their member agencies, which include only the largest police departments across the U.S. This data is shared voluntarily every quarter by the departments themselves. MCAA does not use public or open-source data and only includes participating agencies.
However, when examining a longer time frame rather than just year-to-year comparisons, the data — potentially affected by underreporting or changes in crime classification — reveals crime is actually trending upward.
"If you compare pre-COVID, like we're trending in the right direction, but aggravated assault is still up over 16% from from 2019," Cooper said. "That's sizable. And especially when people are feeling unsettled by crime, aggravated assault is a better barometer of sentiment, when it comes to crime than the homicide numbers. Homicide is still up since 2019."
According to an Axios review of MCAA's data, the outlet reported a 6% overall decrease in violent crime across 69 cities during the first half of 2024 compared to the same period last year from the MCCA data. The review found that 54 of these cities reported reductions in violent crimes — such as homicide, rape, robbery, and aggravated assault — during the first six months of 2024.
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The survey covers Albuquerque, New Mexico; Arlington, Texas; Atlanta, GA; Aurora, Colorado; Austin, Texas; Baltimore; Boston; Buffalo, New York; Charlotte-Mecklenburg, North Carolina; Chicago; Cincinnati; Cleveland; Columbus, Ohio; Dallas; DeKalb County, Georgia; Denver; Detroit; El Paso, Texas; Fairfax County, Virginia; Fort Worth, Texas; Fresno, California; Honolulu; Houston; Indianapolis; Jacksonville, Florida; and Kansas City, Missouri, among others.
However, the independent public policy group, the Coalition for Law, Order, and Safety (CLOS), argues that according to their analysis, violent crime is up across 66 major cities.
CLOS's January to June 2019 data for that same period in 2024 suggests there was a 9.6% increase in total violent crime, with aggravated assault up nearly 25% and murder up by 6.4%.
"The problem is in this game of telephone, the agencies don't always submit correct data or possibly the MCCA creates a typo, or gets the data mangled," Sean Kennedy, the executive director for CLOS told Fox News Digital. "So, that becomes a problem where you see data not matching what the law enforcement agency publicly reports."
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"The most flagrant example is publicly on the Philadelphia website," Kennedy said. "There are twice as many murders in Philadelphia in the period they're describing than what the MCCA reported."
CLOS's violent crime data, shared first with Fox News Digital, excludes Oklahoma City, LA County Sheriff, New Orleans and St. Louis County due to missing data.
"The data sets are fallible," Kennedy said. "There's no perfect data. The FBI data is not perfect. The MCCA data is not perfect, even the law enforcement agency data isn't perfect. They're all trying to get an approximation of what the trend lines and the volume of crime is in United States, so you can look at your local area and what the local numbers look like, what the local factors are, and then say, ‘Does this trend hold elsewhere?’"
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One example, Kennedy said, is that Washington, D.C., has not become safer compared to the first six months of Biden’s term, contrary to the Axios analysis. The number of murders has remained unchanged, while rapes have actually increased in the first half of 2024 compared to 2021, according to CLOS data.
CLOS reported there were 1,025 robberies reported in the first six months of 2024, up from 817 in the same period of 2021, indicating a rise in robbery rates. Although aggravated assaults have dropped from 755 to 538, this decrease is modest compared to historical levels.
Overall, though, violent crime in Washington, D.C., has slightly increased, with a total of 1,744 violent crimes reported in the first half of 2024 compared to 1,747 in 2021. This suggests that while crime has decreased from the previous year, it is still higher than during Biden’s initial six months in office.
"Some of the numbers do make sense in the context, for example, of robbery, when you compare these numbers are actually in some categories will be worse in if you compare 2020 the first half of 2020 to the first half of 2024, and it makes total sense, if you know what you're looking at, and that is in the first half of 2020, robberies generally went down in a lot of jurisdictions because of COVID," Kennedy said. "Basically, you can't mug people if they're not there."