About those crime statistics...

I have been, prior to the second Trump Administration, suspicious of crime statistics, particularly those in the FBI’s annual Uniform Crime Report. That’s because for a long time, many state and local jurisdictions quit reporting their crime statistics, or their reports were notoriously unreliable.

Many blue cities and states suddenly reported enormous drops in all manner of crimes, and particularly violent crimes committed largely by minorities such as blacks and illegal Hispanic immigrants. Blacks comprise only about 13% of the population, but commit violent crimes, and some others, far out of proportion to their numbers. Blue statistics have also been skewed by categorizing crimes committed by minorities as committed by whites, and by forcing officers to categorize felony crimes as misdemeanors.

If you don’t report crimes at all, or fudge the numbers in other ways, you can create miraculous drops in crime which vindicate the Democrat policies that fueled all that crime in the first place.

Americans have also been regaled with tales of horrific racism and all manner of crimes committed by whites against blacks. We are, supposedly, an irredeemably racist country. As I recently wrote, the Southern Poverty Law Center has been exposed as a race-hustling fraud. Their reason for being is “fighting racism,” but the demand for racism so exceeds the pitifully low supply that they’ve been creating it with millions in funding for years. We’ve also been told there is an epidemic of white police officers wantonly killing black men, particularly unarmed black men. Yeah, not so much:

That should be unsurprising, and what’s equally unsurprising is that black criminals also prey on black victims, creating chaos in black communities about which Democrats pretend to care so much.

Heather Mac Donald is America’s preeminent scholar on race and criminal justice. In 2020, she wrote that, for the previous five years, the police shot about 1000 people.  Blacks, despite being 13% of the population, comprised 23% of those shot. Police shoot far more white people than black people. By the end of June, 2020, the police shot only 14 “unarmed” blacks but 25 whites, according to the Washington Post. That was only about 0.2% of black homicide victims for an average year.

Later in 2020, Mac Donald reported that in America’s largest 75 counties, blacks are 15% of the population but make up about 60% of all murder and robbery defendants. Police officers are up to 30 times more likely to be killed by black males than black males are to be killed by police officers. She also reported that blacks commit homicide at a rate eight times that of whites and Hispanics combined.

In 2024, the facts changed little if at all. Mac Donald reported:

Officers in 10 large cities and counties were more likely to shoot a suspect, without first being attacked, if the suspect was white than if the suspect was black. 

This is interesting:

That same Harvard economist, Roland Fryer, analyzed the forms that New York police officers fill out after stopping a suspect. Fryer found that blacks were 21% more likely than whites to have an officer use non-lethal force on them, such as an officer placing his hands on a suspect or drawing his weapon without using it.

Why might that be?  Because blacks are four times more likely to resist arrest and assault police officers than whites.

And supporting Perry’s findings:

In the universe of all interracial violence between blacks and whites, blacks commit 85.5% of that interracial violence, white less than 15%. 

I’m not suggesting that skin color is an absolute determining factor here, but culture certainly is, and can be an accurate predictor, which is why the police in blue cities tend to be more cautious around young black men, and in these days of defunding the police and prosecuting them for doing their jobs, do their best to avoid contact with them.

And as for crime statistics? It’s likely the federal government’s statistics showing pretty dramatic decreases in violent crime are more believable than they have been in even the recent past, but should still be taken with a grain of salt. Blue cities are still not reporting, or their reports are suspect, though cities like DC, where President Trump was able to employ the National Guard, have produced substantial decreases in violent crime, many of which have been committed largely by blacks. Those cities resisting his offers of help have suffered the predictable consequences.

Mike McDaniel is a USAF veteran, classically trained musician, Japanese and European fencer, lifelong athlete, firearm instructor, retired police officer, and high school and college English teacher. He is a published author and blogger. His home blog is Stately McDaniel Manor. 

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2026/10/about-those-crime-statistics/