One of the central arguments in former President Donald Trump's 2024 campaign is the false claim that the United States is a crime-infested hellhole under the Biden-Harris administration. 

During an August 20 campaign stop in Howell, Michigan, Trump said that people "want to be safe" and, therefore, he would win the election. "You can't walk across the street to get a loaf of bread," Trump said. "You get shot. You get mugged. You get raped. You get whatever it may be. And you've seen it, and I've seen it. And it's time for a change."

On August 22, Trump claimed that Vice President Kamala Harris and President Joe Biden  "unleashed a deadly plague of migrant crime on our country by not doing their job." The next day, in Las Vegas, Nevada, Trump pledged to "stop the crime wave that was caused by this woman," referring to Harris. 

Trump's attacks are untrue. The reality is that violent crime increased during the Trump administration and has declined significantly during the Biden-Harris administration. But Trump's attacks on crime are also unusually effective. A CNN poll released on Wednesday showed that voters trust Trump more on crime in several key swing states, including Arizona (+9), Nevada (+10), and Pennsylvania (+8).

A new report from the Pew Research Center helps explain why Trump's fallacious attacks on crime work. The report found that about 70% of Americans get at least some news about crime from local news outlets. Americans generally trust what they hear on local news — 71% believe that local outlets report the news accurately. 

And what they learn on the local news makes them upset. According to the report, "[m]ost Americans who get news about local crime say they at least sometimes feel concerned or angry about what is happening after seeing or hearing about it." The report also found that the more local crime news people consume, the more likely they are "to say they are concerned about crime in their community affecting them or their family." 

So Trump is tapping into a concern about crime that many people already hold from watching local news. This isn't necessarily because local news is reporting on crime inaccurately. On a day-to-day basis, individual crimes are news. Violent and disturbing crimes are deemed particularly newsworthy. And regardless of the overall level of crime, there are always incidents that can be used to fill the hours of local news scheduled daily. For practical reasons, reporting on longer-term crime trends is much less common. 

Trump is effectively exploiting this dynamic for political gain. And it's a tactic that is effective across party lines. The Pew report found that "virtually identical shares in each party say they are concerned about local crime affecting them or their family."

A new frontier for crime statistics

Another factor that allows false narratives about crime to proliferate is the nature of crime statistics. Since most crime is dealt with locally, crime statistics are collected from a vast array of governmental agencies. The FBI collects and synthesizes this data, but it takes a very long time. For example, we are more than two-thirds of the way through 2024, but the FBI still has yet to release its definitive report on crime in 2023. So, the most recent definitive data is from 2022 — ancient history for political purposes. 

DH Analytics, co-founded by crime data analyst Jeff Asher, just released a new tool to address this problem. The Real-Time Crime Index (RTCI) aggregates "current crime data from hundreds of law enforcement agencies nationwide to present national crime trends as never seen before: as they develop." The RTCI uses "data from more than 350 agencies covering over 80 million people "to provide a statistically meaningful sample.” It looks at crime as a rolling 12-month average, which "accounts for possible weather effects and helps you to understand if crime is up or down relative to what’s normal."

The RTCI data shows clearly that, across several major categories, crime is down substantially during the Biden-Harris administration. This year, as Trump claims America is experiencing a dramatic crime wave, crime is down sharply.

Murder:

Theft:

Rape:

You can explore the data yourself here.