Expert flips script on Dems pushing 'cherry-picked' crime stats to resist Trump's DC crackdown

"These Democrats are citing statistics from the FBI, from its uniform crime report. And the problem with that is that they're portraying it as if it's a record of violent crime," Jim Agresti, president of the nonprofit research institute Just Facts, told Fox News Digital shortly after Trump announced he was sending federal resources to the nation's capital to confront crime in the city.

"But really what it is is a record of crimes that are reported to the police and then those of those crimes that get reported to the FBI. It's not a full record of all violent crimes, and this is a problem. And the FBI is very explicit about this when they present the data in their formal report every year, where they say, 'Do not directly compare the data from year to year because there are differences in how frequently people report crimes and how frequently the FBI gets that data from the local police agencies.'"

While many prominent Democrats, including Mayor Muriel Bowser, have insisted violent crime is at a 30-year low in the city, Agresti told Fox News Digital the "best way to understand the state of violent crime" in any jurisdiction is to look at the number of murders because it is a violent crime that is difficult to "sweep under the rug" because it "produces a dead body."

"When we look at the murder data for DC, we see that it is not a situation that is lower now than it's been in the last 30 years. Quite the opposite," Agresti explained. "It is currently 83% higher than it was at its low point a dozen years ago. So, there is a serious problem with serious crime, violent crime in D.C., and the city now, the nation's capital, has a murder rate that is five times the U.S. average."

Lethality in D.C. jumped by a whopping 341% when compared to 2012 data, the study found, reporting that there were 13 homicides per 1,000 serious violent crimes in 2012 and 57 homicides per 1,000 serious violent crimes in 2024. 

Agresti explained that while many people operate with the belief that crime spiked across the country during and because of COVID, the issue actually began getting worse specifically when the Black Lives Matter rioting erupted.

"That makes a lot of sense," Agresti said. "Police were vilified. They pulled back out of fear of being hurt. People were talking about defunding the police, and there was overall mayhem in this country. So, that rise, by the way, that people blame on COVID actually didn't start with COVID, and it didn't appear in other countries. It happened here where we had these BLM riots."

Agresti told Fox News Digital there is a "clear connection" between crime in the United States and the "Defund the Police" movement and that most people don't grasp the "full extent" of the crime problem in this country.

"We had roughly 17,000 murders last year," Agresti explained. "Imagine if all of them made national news. At the current rate of murders in this county, roughly one in every 230 people in the United States will have their lives cut short by being murdered. That statistic is so unbelievable."

"Think about the horror of that, and beyond all this pain, suffering, death, there's also a financial cost to crime," Agresti said. "It's been quantified in a 2021 academic paper, and, bottom line, crime in all of its forms, pain, death, suffering, financial loss, activities we take to prevent crime, they amount to a cost on our US economy of roughly $40,000 per U.S. household."

Agresti said anyone can "cherry-pick" crime statistics to promote a specific agenda but that it is important to also realize that many crimes also go unreported due to various factors, including animosity toward police or the belief that calling the police won't yield results. 

"The vast majority of crime goes unreported, and another phenomenon that's really, really disturbing is the amount of crimes that are solved," Agresti said. "It used to be in this country, in 1960, that 92% of all murders are solved. In 2023, that figure was down to 58%, meaning that 40-plus percent of people who committed murders got away with it, and they're out there to commit them again."

"When politicians are saying, 'We don't have to worry about this, it's the lowest crime rate in 30 years,' they are abdicating their responsibility," Agresti told Fox News Digital. 

"The Declaration of Independence said that governments are instituted to protect the rights of people, including their life, their liberty and the pursuit of happiness. What we have right now is many politicians and governments who are doing an extremely poor job of that, and the pain and suffering is unbelievable. It's just so broad and so horrible."

Fox News Digital's Emma Colton contributed to this report