From The Council on Criminal Justice:
The United States has two primary ways of measuring the nation’s crime rate: the FBI’s Uniform Crime Reports (UCR) and the Bureau of Justice Statistics’ National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS). Earlier this week, the FBI released 2022 UCR data that showed a drop in the nation’s violent crime rate. There is little doubt that murder declined last year, but NCVS data released in September showed that total violent crime victimization rose in 2022. The divergence between the nation’s two crime measures makes it uncertain whether violent crime actually went up or down in 2022.
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Both too much and too little can be made of the divergence between the UCR and NCVS violent crime rates in 2022. Divergent change in a single year should be viewed in the context of the similar long-term trends in the two indicators—and both sources show an appreciable decline in violent crime since the early 1990s.
That said, changes in the UCR and NCVS violent crime rates have rarely differed as much as they did last year. Part of the reason might be that fewer violent crimes were reported to the police in 2022 than in 2021. Recall that the UCR data are based on crimes known to the police, whereas the NCVS data include both reported and unreported crimes. Approximately 52% of serious violent crimes were reported to the police in 2021 and 48% in 2022, a relative decrease of nearly 8%. The decline in reporting crimes to the police was particularly large for aggravated assault, falling from 61% in 2021 to 50% in 2022, a decrease of 18%.
