1) Not propaganda.?Here is a fundamental of crime statistics: When murders go up and all other UCR crime categories decline or stay stagnant, it offers an inconsistency best explained by this: The cops are cooking the stats. Why? https://twitter.com/ScottHech/status/1344298417963606021

Because you can't hide or downgrade or unfound the crimes with actual bodies. The murder rate is the true tell, perhaps the only true tell left in crime stats. Even felonious or aggravated assaults can be cheated, as blunt force injuries or shots fired w/an absence...

...of wounds can be made to disappear or can be dumped in common or misdemeanor assault categories. Unsolved rapes can be unfounded easily. Unsolved armed robberies become larcenies. Captains then become majors, who become colonels....

...That anyone still credits any crime stat other than murder, or possibly, a sub-UCR category of assaults by shooting involving actual victims, is the sign of the permanent credulousness of the American citizenry. Think about it:

To believe that serious assault declined in NYC last year by 1.7% while murder rose by nearly 40% is to believe one of three possible things: 1) NY's best ERs and trauma units suddenly forgot their critical skill sets and stopped saving a significantly higher % of bleeders....

....2) Those doing violence in NY all went to gun ranges, or acquired sufficient martial arts training so that their assaults were significantly more lethal by percentage or 3) The NYPD is downgrading what crimes they can and they can't hide bodies so that stat stays true...

Occam's razor and the common sense that God gives most mammals requires us to accept the third choice. In my city, Baltimore, murders are through the rough, the police department can't solve many of them -- the clearance rate is half of what it was two decades ago....

...and so shooters -- about 8.5 or 9 out of every ten who take a life, remain on the street. Meanwhile, the police commissioner here is championing an "overall" decline in crime. They're doing great. It's just dumb luck that bodies keep falling. Come on, people. Think.