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 innearly 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? There are several reasons, among them: The United States is more violent than other countries. The baseline level ofviolence in the United States remains higher than its peer countries, which can fuel legitimate fear, according to Lavine. News and social media can stoke fear: Social media and news reports on relatively rare incidents likeflash mob robberiescan further fuel misconceptions about public safety, Piquero said. ThePew Research Center found in 2024that Americans who frequently consume local crime news are more likely to be concerned about crime affecting them personally. Partisanship: The gap between Americans' perception of crime widened farther than ever in 2024, with 29% of Democrats and 90% of Republicans saying they believed crime increased that year,Gallup found. Distrust in data: Crime data is notoriously complicated, in part because of inconsistencies in how local law enforcement track crime. Drawing conclusions from the data has become political fodder. "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." Crime data can be found at the center of the Washington, D.C. firestorm, with Trump callingthe city's crime statistics showing a big drop in some violent crimea "total fraud." D.C. Police Union Chairman Gregg Pemberton has told NBC4 Washington hedoubts the local drop in crime is as largeas officials claim and hasaccused 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 thecontested 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 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 andhate 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 theGun Violence Archive,Crime Data Tooland his firm'sReal Time Crime Indexcan 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, andKathryn Palmer; USA TODAY;Reuters This article originally appeared on USA TODAY:Crime is down. Here's why Americans always feel like its getting worse
