Looking at homicide, which is the most unbiased indicator (not much under/over-reporting), it was at historic lows in 2013, when the homicide rate was 1.45. It has been growing nearly every year since. The latest data I can find is for 2022, which has a 2.273 homicide rate. For reference, that is a little more than 4x the homicide rate of Italy, which is at 0.545, and a little more than 2x Bulgaria's 1.088 rate.
Unfortunately, covid is proving to be a huge outlier, so ending in 2022 isn't that useful. This is the US, but the reactions to covid caused huge crime spikes, which are now retreating fast: https://www.govexec.com/management/2025/08/fbi-us-crime-rate...
Also, some jurisdictions have been known to engage in a practice where criminals are charged with lesser crimes in order to make the violent crime numbers look good.
Are these numbers reliable? Or are people just not reporting them because police won’t do anything? Also, are you accounting for improvements in medical technology? E.g., as of 2013, the rates of murder + attempted murder were 50-60% higher than in 1962:
https://www.thestar.com/news/canada/crime-in-canada-falls-to...
For murders and serious violent crimes like stabbings and robber/assaults resulting in major injuries, or for serious thefts, in a country like Canada or the U.S. i'd believe the numbers are. Very few people in these countries, where perception of police as useful more or less exists, would fail to report such crimes.
On the other hand, just to showcase a counterpoint, in countries like the one I live in (Mexico) even violent crimes and major thefts often don't go reported simply because in many parts, police are considered so useless (or even sometimes collusive with criminals and thus counterporductive) that even for serious things, they're not contacted unless absolutely necessary.
Even with these tendencies however, you'd be surprised how often people do go through the formality of filing a report just in case it turns up a result, particularly for murders and kidnappings, where desperation obligates them.
e.g. Whether there are 1000 stabbing victims per year, or 5000, a low clearance rate means there are still many victims that can only pound sand, without even a remote prospect of seeing any action taken.
It's very relevant. Prevention is the best cure. One set of statistics might paint a grim picture, but a different set might be far more encouraging (of course these could have been fudged but i'm taking op at his word), if violent crime is falling people are safer even if the police are doing a worse job and that's much more important. This runs deeper then that. It's a common theme for people to complain how everything is worse now and the gradual failure of institutions. Any positive news should be highlighted and celebrated.
I'm not saying to ignore the problems, but it's important to get a better perspective.
An 95% clearance rate with 100 crimes leaves the same number of unresolved cases as a 0% clearance rate with 5 crimes. If you have fewer crimes you don't have to spend as much money prosecuting them to get the same results.
As long it’s more than single digit cases per year per city not getting cleared, it seems practically irrelevant to car theft recovery what the number is beyond that. Since police forces have finite staffing and budgets.
Anyone proposing extra resources to be spent or diverted to car thefts would not be taken seriously, if it’s clearly insufficient to even clear most violent cases.
