When Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis announced his candidacy for president last month on Twitter Spaces, he touted Florida’s low crime rate as a proud achievement.
“Calling that Florida is unsafe is a farce,” DeSantis said in the announcement. “I mean, are you kidding me? You look at the cities in this country, they’re full of crime. In Florida, we have the lowest crime rate in 50 years.”
But his claims were based on scattered and incomplete crime data.About half of the agencies that oversee more than 40% of the state’s population are missing Pictured is the Florida Department of Law Enforcement (FDLE) used for statewide estimates.
Participation in national data collection is lower. Only 49 agencies from Florida were included in the FBI’s federal database last year, accounting for less than 8 percent of police departments, according to an analysis by the Marshall Project. That means more than 500 police departments in Florida — including most of the largest agencies, such as the Miami Police Department, the Pinellas County Sheriff’s Office and the St. Petersburg Police Department — have disappeared from across the country. Florida has the lowest participation rate of any state in the nation.
Experts say Florida’s low participation rate means it’s nearly impossible to compare Florida’s crime rate with other states, or to compare Florida’s current crime statistics with figures from past years. “In order to talk about a problem accurately, we need to be able to define the problem properly,” said Brendan Lanz, a professor of criminology at Florida State University. “We simply can’t do that with the data that’s available in Florida.”
A spokesperson for the FDLE said the department had to make estimates because police agencies report data through two systems. The department expects to use estimates for future years as Florida transitions from the legacy data system.
“The methodology used by FDLE statisticians is statistically sound and accurately represents crime trends in Florida,” a spokesperson responded in an email. “The methods used by the FDLE are similar to those used by the FBI.”
A spokesman for the governor referred questions related to the crime data to state law enforcement agencies, but did not answer other questions.
Florida’s data gap is due in part to the FBI’s recent decision to modernize the way it collects crime data in the country. Many law enforcement agencies struggled during the transition from the old crime data collection system (Summary Reporting System) to the newer National Incident Reporting System (NIBRS). In previous years, nearly every police agency in Florida had submitted their crime data to the state. To fill the data gap, state agencies said they had to rely on estimating methods to assess crime rates in 2021 for establishments that did not submit data.
Jeff Asher, a criminologist and co-founder of AH Datalytics, said the crime data gap creates a factual vacuum across the state and the country and gives politicians room to say anything about crime.
“In most cases, people already know nothing about crime data,” Asher said. “It makes it harder for us to say exactly what’s going on at the national level and at the state level.”
Asher said that crime data quality issues aside, DeSantis’ statement that Florida’s crime rate has fallen fits with long-term national trends shouldn’t come as a surprise to the public. “‘Crime is at a 50-year low’ should be a bit like ‘no,'” he said. “Crime is going down. It’s not a big deal.” Property crime and violent crime are said to be down nationwide National Crime Victimization Surveya Department of Justice program that investigates crimes committed against 150,000 households.
Overall, crime trends in Florida are in line with the nation. While experts say Florida’s current crime figures aren’t comparable to figures from past years, DeSantis is right that the state’s overall crime rate is on a downward trend through 2021. As murders spike in cities like New York and Chicago during the pandemic, Miami and orlando Murders also increased.
Crime is down in Florida and nationwide
Crime trends in Florida are on par with national crime trends: steady declines before the pandemic, violent crimes rising in 2020.
While the FBI’s new crime data system will eventually allow criminologists and police planners to analyze crime trends in more detail, Florida’s low participation at the national and state levels makes it an outlier. States that have been slow to transition to the new system, like California, have achieved adoption rates above 50%.
Many law enforcement agencies in Florida say they are transitioning their data management systems, though the process is often complex and can take years.
For example, a spokesperson for the Hillsborough County Sheriff’s Office (the second largest agency in the state, serving the Tampa area) said the department has begun submitting crime data to the state through a new data system, but is not working. People stopped in the status dashboard when they found a bug. The department’s numbers on the dashboard have been consistently higher than those submitted by the county, and the sheriff’s office plans to resume data submissions once the state corrects the error, the spokesperson said.
A spokesman for the Orange County Sheriff’s Office, the state’s third-largest law enforcement agency, said the years-long conversion process of its criminal records management system is nearing completion, with the new system set to go live in the fall. A spokesperson for the Palm Beach County Sheriff’s Office said the agency is currently submitting data through the old system and is committed to using the new system “in the future.”
It’s not just crime data. In Florida, current and former public officials pointed to examples of the DeSantis administration tampering or weaponizing data for political gain.
recent, Tampa Bay Times reports DeSantis’ selection of Florida Surgeon General Joseph Ladapo omitted key data from the state’s analysis to support his argument against COVID-19 vaccinations.
Last summer, DeSantis ousted Andrew Warren, the twice-elected Hillsborough County State Attorney, About “negligence of duty”. the shooting happened after Warren promises not to prosecute people who receive abortions. Warren sued DeSantis over the decision.In testimony, DeSantis’ adviser revealed The governor’s office tried to find evidence in the state’s crime data to support the decision Fire Warren.
A federal judge ruled The removal was illegal but said the court had no power to reinstate Warren. “(T)his suspension of control was motivated by the removal of a reform prosecutor — a prosecutor whose performance was inconsistent with the governor’s law and order agenda — and the resulting political gain,” In his decision, the judge wrote.
Warren, who is still out of office, said Florida data showed crime in the county had been falling since he took office in 2016. In 2021, less than 5% of the county’s population is included in the state’s crime data because major police agencies, such as the Hillsborough County Sheriff’s Office, are missing, meaning crime in Hillsborough Trends cannot be compared to other Florida counties.
“It gives people the power to say what they want when there’s no data,” Warren said.