Is Trump right about violent crime in Venezuela and the US?
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You just get sucked in so gradually and it's done so skillfully that you don't realise.

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Learn more at apu.apus.edu slash military. Hello, and thanks for downloading the More or Less podcast. We're the show which looks at the numbers in the news and in life. And I'm Tim Harford. As the noise of the US election ramps up and up and up,

you may have caught a few claims on crime rates being fired about indiscriminately. We'll meet the next time in Venezuela because it'll be a far safer place to meet than our country, OK? So we'll go, you and I will go and we'll have a meeting and dinner in Venezuela because that's what's happening. Their crime rate's coming down and our crime rate's going through the roof. That was Republican candidate, former president Donald Trump.

telling billionaire Elon Musk that the US is becoming a more dangerous place than Venezuela. So is the US on track to become more dangerous than Venezuela? How can you compare the two? What crime statistics do you look at and how robust are they? Many crimes from robbery to rape are underreported and under-recorded and by different degrees in different places. That makes it very hard to compare countries.

But homicide is not the kind of crime that tends to be ignored. For international comparison, it is one stat that really works. So how does the US murder rate compare to that of Venezuela? Here's Bastian Haare from Our World in Data. Based on the data that we have available, the best cross-national data, it is considerably safer.

to live in the US when it comes to homicides than in Venezuela. Let's put some numbers on this, starting with Venezuela. Depending on the source, we're talking of a homicide rate between 19.3 and 63 per 100,000 people.

With the highest quality source, that's the UN in this case, placing it at the lower end, so more like 19.3 per 100,000 people. Right, and now the US, again with the most recent cross-national data that's available for 2021. There we see that the homicide rate is or was between 5.7 and 7.8 per 100,000 people, depending again on which specific source we look at.

However you look at it, it's a number much, much smaller than even the lowest estimate for Venezuela. The murder rate is about three times higher in Venezuela than in the USA, using the most trustworthy statistics, and other estimates would suggest the gap is much higher. Not that the US has a low murder rate compared to other rich countries,

Bastian told us the US homicide rate is about 10 times higher than countries such as Germany with 0.83 or Spain with 0.61 homicides per 100,000 people. But it's one thing to say, truthfully, that the US is much more dangerous than Spain.

It's quite another to claim that it's becoming more dangerous than Venezuela. Venezuela has consistently ranked in recent decades amongst the highest homicide rates worldwide. 14th, in fact, with Jamaica at number one and the US 33rd. But what the former president implied, and has also said directly elsewhere, is that Venezuelan crime rates are dropping, while the US is seeing a vast rise.

Caracas, Venezuela, really a dangerous place, but not anymore. Because in Venezuela, crime is down 72%. In fact, if they would ever win this election, I hate to even say that, we will have...

Have Venezuelan crime rates been dropping? Are the US crime rates rising? Could the two countries draw a level? Depending on the source, it looks like that homicide rates in Venezuela may have come down a lot in recent years.

So, for example, the UN that has data until 2021 shows about a two-thirds decline in the years before 2021. So there's both just pretty big changes that are possible within a short time span. That's one consideration. And then more between sources.

There it really depends on how the data is collected. Bastian explained that from some data sources covering certain time periods for Venezuela, homicide rates are down.

However, he says we need to be a bit cautious because the most reliable sources have a time lag and may have missed more recent periods of political instability. But with the homicide rates standing as far apart as they are, it would take a huge shift in each country for Venezuela to become safer than the US. Even if we go with the lowest estimates for Venezuela and the highest estimate for the United States,

There's still a large difference between the two countries. So Venezuela getting safer is only relevant to Trump's claim if US violent crime is on a wild, steep, upwards trajectory. Is it?

Republican candidate Donald Trump says it is. There's so much more crime now. Joe Biden is out the other day trying to claim that crime is down, but actually crime is way up all over the world. Crime is down all over the world except here. Crime here is up and through the roof.

When he said something similar in the US presidential debate, ABC moderator David Muir challenged the claim. President Trump, as you know, the FBI says overall violent crime is actually coming down on this country. But these FBI statistics do not deter Donald Trump. He says they can't be trusted because they're skewed by missing data from the cities with the worst levels of crime.

He repeats this claim as often as he repeats the claim that crime is up. The FBI didn't report the most crime ridden cities. They didn't do it. They left out large numbers of areas where they had a lot of crime. This was backed up on Twitter by Trump cheerleader Elon Musk, who retweeted suggestions that big cities with a lot of crime, such as New Orleans and Los Angeles, were not being counted in the figures.

Elon's retweet quote comment was, So what's going on? Can we trust the FBI data? The crime data that the FBI report is gathered from police departments across the US.

But this is a tricky operation, as Jay Albanese, a criminologist from Virginia Commonwealth University, explains. In the US, we have approximately 18,000 police departments, which is a rather shocking number. We started as a bunch of independent groups and we have

city, town, village, police departments which have never merged together into larger agencies. So collecting crime data is a much bigger administrative task than it is in most places. In fact, FBI data has never managed to cover 100% of the country. But the 2023 submissions do include all the largest cities in America. The biggest city that isn't included is Jacksonville, Florida, with a population of just under a million.

Big names such as New York, Chicago and Los Angeles, they're all there. They make every effort to include all the major police departments. Places with high crime rates are included too, such as Memphis, St. Louis, Baltimore and Detroit. In fact, the 10 cities with the highest crime rates in the US are all included in the FBI data.

as well as smaller places with shockingly high rates. Though of course, places are missing from the figures, as they always have been. So is this a problem? The crime data is no more or less reliable than it was five or ten years ago. The same counting measures are happening. Nobody is fooling with the numbers.

Reporting rates did briefly plunge in 2021 when the FBI tried to bring in a new system, but that was just teething problems. In the latest full year data, 85% of law enforcement agencies are covered, and that's the same as in 2020 when Trump was president.

And while 85% may not seem high, in fact, the figures cover 94% of the population, which suggests, again, that on the whole it is the small towns which are not submitting, rather than the big cities.

So if the FBI crime statistics are basically as accurate as they've ever been, then what do the numbers tell us about the wider picture of crime in the US? The good news in the US is that homicide rates have dropped over the last couple of years since COVID. The crime picture is generally good. The burglary rate has dropped almost in half over the last five years. Robbery has dropped, counterfeiting, forgery,

Vandalism has dropped, drug arrests. So there's been a general decline over the last few years. Most concerning, however, is the increase in motor vehicle thefts.

So it's not great that the FBI figures aren't covering the whole country. But it doesn't seem to change the fact that crime, especially homicide, has fallen since 2020 and the Trump presidency. And it's certainly not on track to surpass Venezuela in terms of homicide rates. Our thanks to Jay Albanese from Virginia Commonwealth University and Bastien Harre from Our World in Data.

If you've seen a number you'd like us to take a look at, you can send us an email to moreorless at bbc.co.uk. We will be back next week. And until then, goodbye. Yoga is more than just exercise. It's the spiritual practice that millions swear by.

And in 2017, Miranda, a university tutor from London, joins a yoga school that promises profound transformation. It felt a really safe and welcoming space. After the yoga classes, I felt amazing. But soon, that calm, welcoming atmosphere leads to something far darker, a journey that leads to allegations of grooming, trafficking and exploitation across international borders. ♪

I don't have my passport, I don't have my phone, I don't have my bank cards, I have nothing. The passport being taken, the being in a house and not feeling like they can leave.

You just get sucked in so gradually.

And it's done so skillfully that you don't realize. And it's like this, the secret that's there. I wanted to believe that, you know, that...

Whatever they were doing, even if it seemed gross to me, was for some spiritual reason that I couldn't yet understand. Revealing the hidden secrets of a global yoga network. I feel that I have no other choice. The only thing I can do is to speak about this and to put my reputation and everything else on the line. I want truth and justice.

And for other people to not be hurt, for things to be different in the future. To bring it into the light and almost alchemise some of that evil stuff that went on and take back the power. World of Secrets, Season 6, The Bad Guru. Listen wherever you get your podcasts.

When it's PCS time, you know the drill. Pack, research to new base, get the kids in school, because family supports family. At American Public University, we support military families with flexible, affordable online education that moves with you. As a military spouse, your tuition rate is the same as your partner's, just $250 per credit hour. American Public University, education that moves with you.

Learn more at apu.apus.edu/military