Justin Fox, Columnist

Pssst: Crime May Be Near an All-Time Low

Why do Americans remain unconvinced by the data?

February 12, 2018 at 2:09 PM UTC

Justin Fox is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering business, economics and other topics involving charts. A former editorial director of the Harvard Business Review, he is author of “The Myth of the Rational Market.”

Compelling pictures don't tell the full story.
Photographer: Frederic J. Brown/AFP/Getty Images

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There's been a lot of talk over the past couple of years about rising crime. For good reason: Violent crime and murder were in fact up in the U.S. in 2015 and 2016. Early indications are that crime rates fell in 2017, though.1518033347083 And the really big crime story of our time remains how much it has fallen in this country over the past quarter-century.

The blue line in the above chart comes from the Federal Bureau of Investigation's annual Crime in the United States reports, the 2016 edition of which came out last September. The gray line is from the less-well-known National Crime Victimization Survey of the Bureau of Justice Statistics, from which 2016 data was released in December.1518028826534 As you can see, the BJS data -- based in 2016 on a survey of 134,690 households -- shows an even sharper drop than the data the FBI collects from law enforcement agencies.