John Lott writes for National Review Online about Americans’ concerns involving crime.

A Gallup survey last November showed that 92 percent of Republicans and even 58 percent of Democrats believed that crime was rising. In a series of surveys from March last year to April this year, Rasmussen Reports finds a remarkably constant percentage of Americans who believe that violent crime is getting worse — 60 percent to 61 percent. Roughly four times as many people think violent crime is rising rather than getting better.

News outlets keep claiming that Americans are wrong to believe that crime is rising. But Americans aren’t mistaken.

If you defund the police so arrest rates plummet and people give up reporting crime, then crime statistics can look good even as chaos ensues.

Americans in many parts of the country see that products at CVS or Walgreens stores are behind glass, that they must call a clerk to unlock the glass and then wait while reading and examining the different packages. People know this is costly and something other than what the companies would prefer to do, but they have no choice. Americans also know that things were not like this a few years ago.

Property crime isn’t the only type of crime that is increasing. Violent crime has also gone up.

Those who say crime is falling rely on the FBI’s National Incident-Based Reporting System (NIBRS). But the problem is that the FBI data only count crime that is reported to police, not total crime, and even then, the FBI does a poor job of measuring reported crime.

There are two measures of crime. The FBI’s NIBRS counts the number of crimes reported to police each year, but the Bureau of Justice Statistics uses its National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS) to ask about 240,000 people each year whether they have been victims of crime. Since 2020, these two measures have been highly negatively correlated. The FBI has been finding fewer instances of crime, but people are simultaneously answering in greater numbers that they have been victims.

There are several reasons for this difference, but a simple one is that law enforcement has collapsed.