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From the opinion pages of the Wall Street Journal, this is Potomac Watch.

The FBI releases new crime statistics for 2022 that show a drop in violent offenses, but do those national averages blur the story of which states are

succeeding at ensuring public safety and which states are not?

Welcome, I'm Kyle Peterson. With the Wall Street Journal.

We are joined today by my colleagues, columnist Alicia Finley and Kim Strassal.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation last week released its 2022 crime in the nation statistics.

The Bureau says that this is data on more than 11 million criminal offenses reported to the uniform crime reporting program.

I will cite just a representative example of how this news was discussed in the media.

The Associated Press headline says FBI report violent crime decreases to

pre-pandemic levels but property crime is on the rise. And as usual with statistics like this, it is hard to get national numbers at a perfect

rate of compliance. But according to the AP report, the FBI says this new data represents

83% of police agencies covering about 94% of the

US population and the overall results are that violent crime is down 1.7% including a 6.1% drop in murder and non-negligent

manslaughter but robbery up 1.3% aggravated assaults down 1.1% and overall these violent crime numbers get the

US back to the level of violent crime that we saw prior to the COVID-19

pandemic.

But Alicia, the journal had a fascinating editorial going deeper into the statistics in two states, California, and Florida.

And it makes the argument that these kinds of national numbers miss a big part of the story of what is happening on the ground.

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