President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump have both touted crime and safety as a selling point for their campaigns.
Back in June the Biden administration said, "Violent crime is dropping at record levels."
"Folks, you don't always hear about it but today violent crime rates are down," President Biden said at a National League of Cities event.
Meanwhile, Trump has said American cities are being "ravished by bloodshed and crime."
"Joe Biden is going around trying to claim that crime is down. He says crime is down. Crime is so much up," Trump said during a rally at Temple University.
According to the FBI, the Major Cities Chiefs Association and several other organizations that track crime, it's universally accepted that homicides and most violent crimes dropped nationally in 2023. But the scale of that drop varies depending on whose data you look at. More importantly, the drop comes on the heels of a historic rise during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Jeff Asher, a criminologist and co-founder of AH Datalytics said, "I think that if you were to look at the increase in 2020 and 2021, you would certainly call that historic. Murder had never risen, and gun violence had never risen at a level like that from one year to the next. It's falling at a slightly less strong pace than it went up, but still a historically fast rate compared to how murder and gun violence tends to go."
Thad Johnson, a criminologist and senior fellow with the Council on Criminal Justice said, "Both [candidates] are telling parts of the whole story. We had a historic rise. So any drop is going to be historic."
Cities like Philadelphia, Chicago and New York all saw double-digit decreases in homicides and shootings in 2023.
RELATED STORY | Officials: Iran threat prompted increased protection of Trump, but Saturday attack appears unrelated
Property crime has been more of a mixed bag nationwide, with the FBI reporting drops in burglary and larceny but a continued rise in auto thefts.
Notably, none of this has calmed public concerns.
According to Johnson, "The fear of crime always tends to outpace the actual crime rates."
Howard Lavine, a political psychology professor at the University of Minnesota, says the everyday occurrences can overwhelm the overall numbers. "What the local papers aren't doing is saying, okay, here are some complex statistics showing the decline or the rise and fall of crime. What they're saying is 'Two people got shot a mile from your house,'" said Lavine.
About 6 in 10 Americans describe the crime problem in the U.S. as either "extremely serious" or "very serious" — the highest level ever recorded in Gallup survey going back to 2000.
Lavine added, "Facts don't really matter that much, especially when we're talking about marginal or swing voters, or low-propensity voters who don't really pay close attention."
