Does the US have a crime crisis? Why crime always seems to be going up.
President Donald Trump's crackdown on crime in Washington, D.C. continues a decades-long American story: Data says crime is going down, even as many Americans feel like it's spiraling out-of-control.
FBI data has shown the nation's crime rate declined over the past three decades, but over half of Americans have said they believe there is more crime than the year before in nearly every Gallup survey conducted since 1993.
"People don't keep track of these things. They don't look at statistics...They're just having feelings that they're not safe," said Howard Lavine, a professor of political science and psychology at the University of Minnesota.
Safety is a real concern for many.
Violent crime still occurs every day at rates that can vary widely between and within cities, which can affect the public's perception of their safety, according to Alex Piquero, a professor at the University of Miami and the former director of the Bureau of Justice Statistics.
"Are we safe today? Yeah, we're safer," Piquero said. "But we're not completely safe."
Democrats' Achilles heel: As mayors try to defend cities from Trump, have they learned their lesson on crime?
Why are Americans' perceptions out-of-whack with crime data?
There are several reasons, among them:
"There's a perception problem, right? And so is the perception that crime is out of control? Yeah..." Piquero said. "But the data doesn't necessarily support that."
Can you trust crime data?
Crime data can be found at the center of the Washington, D.C. firestorm, with Trump calling the city's crime statistics showing a big drop in some violent crime a "total fraud.'
D.C. Police Union Chairman Gregg Pemberton has told NBC4 Washington he doubts the local drop in crime is as large as officials claim and has accused the department of deliberately falsifying the data.
People who track crime data are familiar with accuracy issues and tend to focus on big-picture trends.
Piquero said the individuals who produce crime data, particularly at the federal level, are extremely committed to providing "accurate, reliable and timely" information.
"I do not believe that there are people out there cooking books on crime data," he added.
Data analyst Jeff Asher thinks the contested D.C. crime data likely overstates a drop in violent crime, but that's not particularly surprising to him.
Asher, co-founder of the data analytics firm AH Datalytics, said it's not entirely clear why the discrepancy between data reported to the FBI and to the public exist, but it's not uncommon for law enforcement data, particularly real time data, to have inaccuracies, he said.
"One of the pitfalls of people relying on publicly available data is that sometimes it's just wrong," he said. "And that happens - as someone that looks at this data - it happens with depressing frequency."
National crime data has gaps
National crime data isn't perfect, either. The FBI's crime reports rely on information submitted by police, but the country's 18,000 law agencies aren't required to report this data and not all do, which has led to questions about accuracy.
Meanwhile, the Bureau of Justice Statistics produces an annual National Victimization Survey, which includes both reported and unreported crimes.
These reports generally mirror one another, Piquero said, but the BJS survey often shows certain crimes are consistently underreported to police, such as domestic violence, rape and hate crimes. The two sets of data, taken together, can provide a sense of how crime is changing, he said.
"One is not inherently better than the other. I have always advised that people should look at both of them," Piquero said.
Asher said other sources, including the Gun Violence Archive, Crime Data Tool and his firm's Real Time Crime Index can help Americans understand broader trends in crime. Despite the issues with crime data, Asher said, the drop reported in DC fits a broader picture. "We certainly feel confident about the declines we're seeing nationally."
Contributing: Erin Mansfield, Zac Anderson, and Kathryn Palmer; USA TODAY; Reuters
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