Presidential candidates clash over who will do best to reduce rising crime, Louisiana’s governor joined with the Legislature to make a raft of changes to combat this, while local leaders as in New Orleans preen over a measured drop in it as well as those in Shreveport. This begs the question: as some indicators show crime rates falling nationally with most jurisdictions reflecting that, can politicians in Louisiana or elsewhere take credit for that – if it even exists?
Last month, the Federal Bureau of Investigation released final statistics through its Uniform Crime Reporting Program that showed nationally violent crime declined an estimated 3 percent in 2023 from the year before, while murders and non-negligent manslaughter dropped nearly 12 percent. The overall rate now stands just above the 2019 level prior to the spike observed during the Wuhan coronavirus pandemic and is close to returning to reflecting the long-term secular decline in violent crime over the past three decades, although it basically has been flat since 2012. Perhaps better, preliminary numbers for 2024 show a continued decline.
While good news, it may not be all that it’s cracked up to be, beginning with the fact that the FBI’s system (which underwent a major change as the pandemic took hold) is a measure of crime reported or discovered by law enforcement, while different measures tell the opposite story. The Bureau of Justice Statistics compiles the National Crime Victimization Survey which measures crime not reported to law enforcement as well, with the exception of homicides and manslaughter because the dead tell no tales although these generally comprise about a percentage point of total violent crime. NCVS numbers typically differ, sometimes significantly, from the UCR, and it reported a small proportional increase for 2023 after double-digit spikes in 2021 and 2022 but a big dip in 2020. In fact, for these years the absolute differences were for the NCVS starting in 2020 29.31 percentage points lower, 20.18 higher, 24.81 higher, and 7.63 higher.
As for another view of murder rates, the Centers for Disease Control tracks that. It shows that rate higher in 2022 than 2020, and even the UCR numbers have the 2023 rate at just under 10 percent higher than the 2019 rate.
The NCVS and UCR numbers typically aren’t that close, but have really diverged since 2019 (before 2019, only twice since 2007 had the absolute difference between greater than single digits). One possible reason for this is beginning in earnest in 2020 leftist politicians with media complicity and amplification made much of a supposed and illusory war that police have on racial minority members, who disproportionately comprise both crime victims and criminals. This may have increased distrust in those communities that has discouraged reporting crime to authorities – the UCR numbers disproportionately are driven by large jurisdictions with the highest proportion of minorities – only recently having begun to thaw.
Also potentially problematic is these largest jurisdictions, as well as in others with disproportionately-large minority populations, over the past several years often have drawn “progressive” prosecutors into power. These individuals see the criminal justice system as unusually punitive towards non-white people and therefore use the powers of their offices to inculcate “equity” into the system. One method they pursue is to dismiss or downgrade charges regarding crimes where, typically, blacks disproportionately are charged, so victims who reported these crimes might report theirs factually as a violent crime but in the criminal justice system it eventually was treated as something not categorized as a violent crime.
Despite statistical evidence that disputes whether violent crime has decreased in the past few years or even in the last dozen, let’s say it is going down. Still, that doesn’t mean policy has anything to do with it, particularly as the trend has been widespread even as different jurisdictions do different things. Because the most important driver of violent criminal activity always has been the proportion of youth in the population, as crime is a youngster’s game for the most part. As that falls, so should crime.
And in a comparison of proportions of the national population 0-18 years in age and 19-25, from 2008 through 2022 a clear decline has occurred, from 26 to 23.1 percent for the younger category (assuming changes are basically uniform for each individual age as only in the upper range does criminal activity occur) and 9.2 to 8.7 percent in the older. For Louisiana, the numbers are 26.9 to 24.7 percent and 10.1 to 8.7 percent.
In short, these demographics would forecast a gradual decline over time that the national rate hasn’t quite attained in terms of magnitude. But in Louisiana, things went completely the other way, rising slightly until the second year of changes to reduce punishment and imprisonment spearheaded by Democrat former Gov. John Bel Edwards upon which the increase accelerated far beyond the national rate. Louisiana went from having a violent crime rate about a quarter higher in 2012 to one about two-thirds higher than the national rate in 2022.
Republican Gov. Jeff Landry headed up efforts to reverse this recently, although those changes won’t likely start reflecting in statistics until next year. So, it’s quite possible that the Edwards approach that depopulated prisons and lightened sentences had a one-time impact of weakened deterrence that pushed crime rates higher, which more than counteracted the aging effect, but fixed at that level by 2021 then the aging effect began to erode that. If Landry’s right, in the next couple of years Louisiana’s rate will fall faster than the national, with the aging effect being the wind in the sails complemented by his policy restoration – if we believe to be accurate the statistics arguing for a decrease. Regardless, the aging effect should continue to be a positive drag on violent crime commission in Louisiana and most of the nation where it operates.
In short, we really can’t tell whether violent crime has fallen nationally or in many jurisdictions, including Louisiana. And any genuine decline to date might have little to do with policy but mostly is a product of things largely out of control of politicians, such as the population becoming older. So, at this juncture take with a grain of salt proclamations from politicians that what they are doing has had a positive impact on crime.