President Biden says U.S. Violent Crime Rate at 50-year Low -True or False?
Posted by Ed Folsom, July 25, 2024.
Photo: Evan Vucci, Pool, AP.
Last night, in his prime-time address to the nation, President Biden touted a series of claimed accomplishments. As one claimed accomplishment, Biden told us, “And today, violent crime rate is at a 50-year low [sic].” (see transcript, here). Is that true? Well…No. In fact, according to FBI statistics, it isn’t even at the lowest point in the last 10 years.
The FBI counts four types of crimes in the category of “violent crime”: homicide, rape, robbery, and aggravated assault. Combined, the violent crime rate was up more than 5% in 2022 (the last year for which data has been released) over 2014.
Homicide: The 2022 homicide rate was 6.3 per 100,000 population, up 43% over the 2014 rate of 4.4 per 100,000. The 2022 rate was down somewhat from 2021 when the rate hit a recent peak of 6.8 per 100,000, up 54.5% over 2014. In fact, the last time before 2021 that the U.S. homicide rate hit 6.8 per 100,000 was 1998. It then stayed below that for the next 23 years.
Rape: The 2022 rape rate was 40 per 100,000, rising 10%, from a rate of 35.9 per 100,000 in 2013, the first year the FBI began using its new definition of the offense for record keeping purposes.
Robbery: Robbery was, in fact, very near its half-century low in 2022, coming in at 66.1 per 100,000, up just slightly from the previous 25+ year low of 65.5 in 2021. This is the only offense in the “violent crime” category that can honestly be said to be at a 50-year low.
Aggravated Assault: Aggravated assaults came in at a rate of 268.2 per 100,000 in 2022, up 14% over the recent low of 229.2 per 100,000 in 2014.
From this, we can see that robbery is the only violent crime component that is at a 50 year low. The rates for the other offenses in the category are up from their 10-year lows. Homicides are up very sharply over their 10-year lows, at rates not seen since the late 1990’s.
Although President Biden told us earlier in his same speech, “When you elected me to this office, I promised to always level with you, to tell you the truth,” his claim that, “And today, violent crime rate is at a 50-year low [sic],” earns a rating of FALSE.
A lot of people seem to believe that firearms homicides are at an all time high, but they are not. According to Pew Research, gun murders were committed at the rate of 7.2 per 100,000 in 1974 versus 6.7 per 100,000 in 2021, a decline of just under 7 percent from point to point. Gun murders have, however, been lower than 6.7 per 100,000 over the past decades. The rate of gun murders has increased significantly since 2014. It rose about 45% between 2019 and 2021.
Most deaths from firearms are still suicides, not murders.
