America’s Crime Data Has a Reporting Problem

by: Leonard Sipes
05/04/2026
Source: Law Enforcement Today Opinion
05/04/2026

Crime scene tape by is licensed under

Per the FBI, national reported U.S. property crime trends for December 2024 – November 2025 indicate a 12.1 percent decrease at the time of this writing.

The FBI reports a national 10 percent decrease in violence.

Personal Experience-Reporting Crimes

I had a chainsaw stolen from my house when it was being constructed. Did I report it? No. The probability of local law enforcement finding my chainsaw was minuscule, so why bother?

Someone stole my retirement badge from the Maryland Department of Public Safety from my truck. Did I report it? Yes, because of its possible use by someone in the commission of a crime.

Someone threatened a family member with violence. Did I report it? No. I had an intermediary tell this person to NEVER make that threat again. That solved the problem.

These examples illustrate the problems with using crimes_ reported_ to the police as an indication of accurate total numbers.

Issues With Reported Crime

The majority of all crime is not reported to law enforcement. Approximately 30 percent of property crimes are reported, and property crime makes up approximately 70 percent of all crime. About half of violent crimes are reported, according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics. [17]

There are endless additional issues when trying to make sense of crime in America, beyond the small percentages of crimes reported to the police, such as the number of crimes reported per incident (up to 10) included in the FBI’s new National Incident-Based Reporting System (NIBRS) statistics.

The FBI continues reporting one_ primary crime_ per incident for national crime statistics, not the additional crimes offered by law enforcement per incident through the NIBRS. That keeps crime trends comparable over decades; it’s a reasonable decision.

The additional crimes per incident (up to 10), however, are used in special reports on crime (see below) via the FBI’s NIBRS. The higher the numbers, the better the results.

The final issue is whether law enforcement agencies are faithfully reporting all crimes per incident to the FBI. It’s been my experience that police agencies have been reluctant to increase their crime totals by adding all charges per incident, one possible reason as to why it took so long for law enforcement to adopt the NIBRS reporting system.

Property Crimes

Some of the figures below come from private surveys, not official USDOJ statistics. Key issues:

Methodologies vary widely; results are not directly comparable to FBI totals.
Some private surveys estimate tens of millions of package thefts annually, figures that, if accurate, would exceed reported FBI property crime totals. However, these estimates rely on self-reported data and are not directly comparable to official crime statistics.
Nevertheless, the data below (using various dates) provide insight into the extent of national property crimes.

Per Gallup [18], Americans are most likely to have experienced theft, with 14% saying money or property was stolen from them or another household member in the past year. Vandalism, at 12%, is also one of the more common crimes.

According to Pew, [19] about a third of Americans report having experienced an online shopping scam.

Overall, adults 60 and older reported losing $2.4 billion in 2024 to fraud [20], including money lost to investment scams, according to the Federal Trade Commission’s annual report to Congress. That’s up 26.3% from $1.9 billion in 2023.

Retail shrinkage (shoplifting, organized attacks, and employee theft) hit $94.5 billion in 2021, a 53% jump from 2019, according to the National Retail Federation’s annual survey of around 60 retail member companies, CNN. [21]Data from a variety of sources suggests that shoplifting losses continue to increase.

According to the National Retail Federation, $112.1 billion in losses were attributed to shrinkage, mostly theft and organized retail crime (ORC)—in 2022, a 19% increase over the year before. Retailers reported a 93% increase in the average number of shoplifting incidents per year in 2023 versus 2019 and a 90% increase in dollar loss due to shoplifting over the same time period, The Impact of Retail Theft & Violence 2024 [22].

There are 120 million porch package thefts [14] in the US. Searches for “stolen package” spike every December, according to Google Trends. The survey indicated that there are f_ar more porch-pirate thefts than the total number of property crimes reported to the FBI._ The financial toll of these thefts is $16 billion.

Inside Edition [23] television offered a report examining storage unit thefts. They observed that storage unit companies often did not report break-ins to law enforcement and cited a storage company in Denver that had 55 burglaries in one year.

USA Today [24] offered that scammers and cybercriminals stole a record total of $16.6 billion from Americans in 2024, marking a 33% increase in losses from 2023, the FBI said in a new report.” “The report released by the FBI’s Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3) revealed that the “staggering” new record is likely an undercount of the total loss from cyber-enabled fraud and scams. The figure is only representative of information and complaints submitted by victims to the IC3, FBI officials confirmed.

The Hill [25] (newspaper of Congress) addresses cargo theft. The numbers we do know are concerning. The average value of each cargo theft is more than $200,000, and according to the National Insurance Crime Bureau, there has been a 1,500 percent increase [26] in cargo theft incidents since 2021. Total cargo theft losses increased by 27 percent in 2024 and are projected to rise another 22 percent in 2025.

Check fraud [27]. This is far from an isolated incident. A recent report from the FBI and the United States Postal Inspection Service shows cases of check fraud nearly doubled between 2021 and 2023 nationwide.

Pew: Most U.S. adults (73%) say they’ve experienced some kind of online scam or attack [28] across age groups. Many get scam calls, texts, and emails at least weekly.

The data from the agencies above includes various dates, suggesting increases. Those increases may (or may not) make it into FBI property crime statistics.

Violent Crime

There is an increase in incidents of domestic violence with extreme violence, including multiple homicides. Per the Washington Post [29], “We’re seeing a lot more survivors who have been shot or stabbed,”

Domestic assaults with a deadly weapon have increased by 186 percent compared with last year, D.C. police said, and make up nearly 90 percent of all such assaults.

Domestic violence is measurable in FBI data—but not easily visible. The FBI does not publish a single, headline “domestic violence” metric. It collects victim–offender relationship data (spouse, boyfriend/girlfriend, family, etc.), which allows analysts to extract “domestic” incidents from broader crime categories.

According to an FBI special report [30] (2026), over the five years studied, the percentage of violent crimes within domestic relationships increased. Law enforcement reported more than 11,000 domestic violence murder victims and an additional 1.1 million victims of domestic violence. Nearly 75 percent of the victims were female.

Yet as of this writing, the FBI is reporting a national 10 percent decrease in violence.

The report above relies on the increased number of crimes counted by the FBI’s National Incident-Based Reporting System (10 per incident), while national FBI crime statistics offer one primary crime per category.

Violent Crime And Reported Crimes

74 percent of violent victimizations against juveniles were not reported to the police, [31]and juvenile crime seems to be growing in some cities.

For identity theft, roughly 7 percent of incidents were _reported _per the Bureau of Justice Statistics.

Thirteen percent of sexual assaults are reported to law enforcement in urban areas per the Bureau of Justice Statistics.

About 12,000 hate crime incidents were reported to the FBI, and approximately 250,000 yearly hate crime incidents were recorded by the Bureau of Justice Statistics National Crime Victimization Survey in 2023. If you are making policy, you rely on the largest number possible.

There are many additional examples I could offer based on a lack of reporting.

Conclusions

Crime stats don’t lie, but they don’t tell the whole truth either. Anyone can make any claim they want about crime using FBI or National Crime Victimization Survey data.

The FBI measures reported crime. The public experiences total crime.

Using crimes reported to law enforcement as a gauge of all crimes in America is filled with methodological pitfalls, which is why I rely on the USDOJ’s National Crime Victimization Survey [15] from the Bureau of Justice Statistics, which records all crime (with some exceptions, i.e., it surveys people over the age of 12, business crimes are not included, homicides are not counted-you can’t interview dead people).

The NCVS is what the US Department of Justice calls “the nation’s primary source of information on criminal victimization.”

The National Crime Victimization Survey recorded a record 44 percent increase [17] in violent crime rates in 2022, and rates have remained the same per the USDOJ’s Bureau of Justice Statistics in 2023 and 2024 (last full report). The FBI is reporting decreased crime.

But in all fairness, the use of crime data as reported to law enforcement has been around since the 1930s; it’s what people (and journalists) are familiar with.

In my opinion, it may be a troubling (inaccurate?) source of information on crime. Still, as long as people understand its pitfalls, it provides us with decades of reasonably accurate crime trend data.