Nowadays, many of us are watching the news, no longer knowing what to believe. The FBI is telling us that crime has been going down for the last couple of years. In the meantime, the evening news keeps showing us violent crimes, murder, corrupt politicians, school shootings, and human trafficking like never before.
At the same time, the FBI released the crime report for 2021, but only 52% of those law enforcement agencies submitted a full report. Moreover, 11% of the rest only delivered partial information. This means that the rest of them sent out no information at all.
Incomplete Data
Every year, law enforcement agencies are required to submit their criminal reports to the FBI. This way, we can get a better idea of what is going on in our society and whether we are safe from criminals while walking down the street or not.
According to the annual report submitted by the FBI for 2021, violent crime is down by 1%. While not much, this number should make us feel safer when we are outside, right? Well, you may want to still practice care.
The truth is that about 37% did not submit their data, which makes us wonder about all those blind spots. Some provided the data, but it was incomplete. The bureau gave a perfectly reasonable explanation for that: they changed the data admission system.
Some cities had no issues submitting the new crime data. Others, however, seemed to stumble across some issues. Several could still transmit the data, incomplete as it was. Others did not transmit the information at all. This puts us in a bit of a blind spot because we don’t know exactly where we are with the crime rate.
This change in methodology came at quite a precarious moment. Since we don’t have the necessary data, we cannot come up with a pattern or a solution to why everything is happening. Law enforcement blames it on the elections because that’s when the crimes began to spike. People were unhappy, and therefore, decided to take matters into their own hands
Increasing Homicide Rate
Homicide rates are often used during elections when politicians make their claims and promises. They claim that law enforcement is doing the best it can to keep citizens safe, boasting that electing them will lead to general safety.
What they say and what they do doesn’t seem to match, because, in 2021, we saw a significant 25% increase in killings. These numbers have jumped with us barely even noticing them, the crime rate remaining pretty much the same throughout 2021.
Law enforcement has yet to release the new data, but we can already see the trend. While they are boasting lower crime rates, the homicides all over the US suggest otherwise.
School shootings have also increased significantly over the past couple of years, suggesting that the extra security measures taken by schools are not nearly enough. This led to numerous protests throughout the year – none of which have been resolved.
Homicide saw the most increase in the bigger cities such as Chicago and New York. Other smaller cities such as Minneapolis, Indianapolis, and Oakland also saw a spike, but the numbers are much smaller. That being said, companies such as Eskew Law, LLC, are already expecting to see an increase in criminal cases, driven by previous data.
If we compare it to the early 90s, indeed, the homicide rate saw a significant drop – from 2,200 people killed in New York to a bit over 400 nowadays. That being said, we are not in the 90s anymore, and the spike in homicide rates is concerning. While the murder rate is significantly lower than it was 30 years ago, it’s much higher than it was 4 years ago.
Cyber-attacks have also shown an alarming 15.1% increase, showing that murder is not our only problem. Seeing as the data we have from the bureau is incomplete, we can only wonder if those numbers are accurate or if they are higher than we are told.
The Bottom Line
According to data gathered by the FBI, we are technically on the low, with crimes slightly dropping compared to last year. The problem is that we still do not have the big picture. Crime reports everywhere suggest that criminality of all kinds is increasing, causing a lot of anxiety in the population. We don’t know whether we’ll ever receive those numbers or not, but what we do know is that things are much worse than we thought.
