Despite a recent uptick, US murder and violent crime rates remain near historic lows, raising concerns about the attorney general’s approach to the issue

Minutes after he was sworn in as attorney general, Jeff Sessions said he believed the recent uptick in crime in America was a “dangerous permanent trend”. But criminologists said he had “no evidence” to support this contention.

“Jeff Sessions is the first person who suggested this is a permanent trend,” said Jerry Ratcliffe, a member of the justice department’s Science Advisory Board and the director of Temple University’s Center for Security and Crime Science. “I don’t think anyone from a data perspective would agree with it.”

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The Trump administration’s willingness to exaggerate real crime problems far past the limits of the available data or evidence raises troubling questions about what role the justice department will play in addressing violence in cities across the country.

On Thursday, in his first brief remarks as the country’s highest law enforcement official, Sessions reinforced Trump’s inflammatory vision of “American carnage” caused by rising crime and terrorism.



“We have a crime problem,” Sessions told reporters in the Oval Office. “I wish the rise that we’re seeing in crime in America today were some sort of aberration or a blip. My best judgment, having been involved in criminal law enforcement for many years, is that this is a dangerous permanent trend that places the health and safety of the American people at risk.”

Several leading crime experts said the data led them to the opposite conclusion: it was much too soon to call the increase in murders a trend at all, much less a permanent one. Sessions’s judgment “is not consistent with the professional judgment of, to my knowledge, anyone else in criminal justice right now,” said Thomas Abt, an expert on gun, gang and youth violence policy who worked in the Obama justice department.

America’s overall violent crime rate remains near historic lows. But the country saw a sharp 10.8% uptick in murders in 2015, the largest single-year increase in decades. Early data from 2016 suggests that nationwide murder numbers may have risen again last year.

Fact-checkers were quick to note that murder and violent crime rates remain close to historic lows, and that the steep uptick in 2015 has not come anywhere close to erasing the country’s two decades of gains in safety and decreases in violence.

“The long-term crime decline is far from over,” Rosenfeld said. “We’re still running at homicides rates in the United States that are about one half what they were in the early 90s.”

The violent crime rate is far below where it was in the 1990s The violent crime rate is far below where it was in the 1990s

But this increase in violence has prompted fierce partisan debates over gun laws, poverty, racial bias in policing and the “Ferguson Effect”, the theory that America’s protests over police killings of black Americans are to blame for the murder increase. According to different variations of the theory, the widespread protests against police racism since Michael Brown was killed in Ferguson in 2014 have either emboldened criminals or made officers more hesitant in carrying out their jobs.

For more than a year, conservatives and progressives have accused each other of distorting the significance of these murder increases for political gain. But until Thursday, crime experts said, no one in the debate had suggested that the troubling increase in murders might be “permanent”.



“Sessions’ claim that increases in violent crime represent a new normal is unprecedented,” Abt said.

With the exception of Chicago, the cities that saw the largest murder increases in 2015 were not the same cities that saw the largest increases in 2016, according to Richard Rosenfeld, a criminologist who wrote a justice department-funded study on the 2015 murder increase. That suggests more of temporary pattern than a long-term trend, he said.

Trump’s false claims about America’s crime rates have become so common that CNN wrote a news article this week about an instance when Trump correctly cited the crime statistics of the country he leads.

Earlier this week, Trump had claimed that the country’s murder rate “is the highest it’s been in 47 years”. In fact, despite seeing the largest single year uptick in more than 40 years, the country’s murder rate in 2015 remained lower than it was in 2009.

But the new administration’s focus on rising murder numbers, and on Chicago in particular, is not a fake story: it’s a very real problem that the administration seems eager to inflate.

Official data from the FBI found that the number of murders in America rose 10.8% from 2014 to 2015, the biggest single-year percentage jump since 1971. National crime data for 2016 will not be available for months. But preliminary mid-year data from the FBI suggested that the 2016 murder rate might show another clear increase, one that might have been significantly driven by the historic rise in Chicago, as well as other cities with the most severe gun violence problems.

National murder numbers do a poor job of capturing the real patterns of violence in America, which are marked by stark geographic and racial disparities.

A Guardian analysis found that tiny neighborhood areas that represent just 1.5% of the country’s total population saw 26% of all gun homicides in 2015. The neighborhoods burdened by high rates of gun homicide are marked by high levels of poverty, low levels of educational attainment, and stark degrees of racial segregation.

But the intense clustering of gun homicide also means that relatively targeted approaches to reducing violence can have a big impact.

Ratcliffe, the Temple University professor, said it was important not to be complacent about any increase in homicide. But he called Sessions’s suggestion of a permanent crime increase “an insult to hard-working cops” and said that the claim “suggests that police officers and the communities they work with aren’t able to respond to this, and I don’t see that”.



Though the murder increase in 2015 was driven by an increase in gun murders, Trump has made it clear that he is not interested in passing stricter gun control laws. Instead, he is likely to support the push of his allies at the National Rifle Association to pass a sweeping concealed carry law that would weaken local gun restrictions and make it easier to carry guns in public across different states.