Professor John Pfaff was quoted in Vox about recent U.S. crime rates.
[T]he murder data is some of the most reliable that federal government collects, since it’s pretty difficult for the police to miss a dead body. And the FBI has found two years of notable increases in the murder rate — 11 percent in 2015 and 8 percent in 2016. That indicates something is going on.
But which one of these reports is right about overall violent crime? Frankly, we just don’t know. As criminal justice expert John Pfaff explained when there was a similar rift between the FBI and NCVS data for 2015, the NCVS is widely considered more reliable. But both reports have enough gaps to prevent any hard conclusions in either direction. (Pfaff also argued after the release of 2016 data that it’s better to look at what the different sources tell us — by giving insight into slightly different populations — than try to figure out which source of data is right.)
So we don’t really know if violent crime went up in 2016 or 2015. That leaves us with a very unsatisfying conclusion: To see if the decades-long crime drop has started to reverse, we’ll probably have to wait for a few more years of data from both the FBI and NCVS to see the long-term crime trends instead of focusing on just one or two years of data.