Jeffrey Anderson is our go-to guy on government statistics. Indeed, he has responded to my call for help sorting out local issues. I drew on his help in Power Line posts that are compiled here. Now he turns his attention to a recently released Bureau of Justice Statistics report on violent crime rates. Having served as BJS director in the first Trump administration, Jeff knows a thing or two about it. He writes:
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On the heels of the recent controversy over major statistical revisions of unemployment data by the Labor Department, the Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS) has just released a report containing highly questionable state violent crime rates. The report’s unreliable numbers are not the result of errors in calculation or any deliberate attempt to skew the results. Rather, they are the product of applying a methodology that is incapable of producing accurate results for the statistical categories in question. Indeed, they provide further evidence of the folly of parroting the mantra, “Trust the experts.”
I’m intimately familiar with the BJS, having served as its director during the first Trump administration. The bureau generally focuses on providing national, rather than state or local, statistics. The report in question, however, provides crime rates for each of the 22 largest states, comparing those rates for the three-year period spanning 2017 to 2019 and the three-year period spanning 2020 to 2022. The findings suggest that the BJS should have stuck to producing national statistics.
For example, the BJS report claims that the number of victims of violent crime in Arizona dropped nearly in half during those three-year periods, to just 20.0 per 1,000 people from 36.8 per 1,000. But the state’s largest law-enforcement agency, the Phoenix Police Department, reports that over those periods the city’s homicides rose 42 percent and its violent crime rate rose by 9 percent. It’s awfully hard, therefore, to believe the BJS numbers that claim violent crime fell precipitously statewide when statistics from the state’s dominant city say otherwise.
The report’s comparisons across other states are similarly suspect….
Whole thing here.
