According to new FBI data, violent crime dropped by 3% in 2023, with murders falling 11.6% year-over-year.
The report comes less than two weeks after Donald Trump was fact-checked in his debate with Kamala Harris for claiming violent crime is on the rise.
The latest report is potentially good news because Trump is right that recent FBI crime stats have been notoriously spotty. In 2022, New York and Los Angeles both failed to submit crime data to the FBI as they struggled to comply with an updated system implemented in 2021.
In addition, under the new system, the FBI’s data sets haven’t always matched local police departments. In 2023, the FBI undercounted the number of aggravated assaults in Nashville by nearly 1,000.
Crime analyst Jeff Asher summed up the situation following the release of an FBI data set earlier this year, saying “crime almost certainly declined nationally,” but “the FBI’s data is almost certainly overstating that decline.”