Mainstream narratives about crime and immigration have increasingly divorced themselves from empirical reality.
Although government databases show clear demographic patterns in violent crime and gang activity, media outlets and Democrat administrations, particularly under Barack Obama and Joe Biden, have suppressed, distorted, or discontinued key crime data collection programs that once supported national law enforcement efforts.
Many jurisdictions, particularly those with sanctuary policies, do not track or report crimes by immigration status, meaning offenses committed by illegal aliens are often excluded from official statistics.
Major Democrat-led cities such as New York, Los Angeles, and Philadelphia failed to submit crime data during the FBI’s transition to the NIBRS system, further weakening the accuracy of national crime reporting.
Flawed conclusions based on incomplete or biased secondary sources, such as academic studies, think tank reports, and media summaries, have gained widespread acceptance.
These sources typically rely on conviction and incarceration data, which omit cases where suspects evade trial.
This is especially significant in sanctuary cities and jurisdictions where illegal immigrants are released without bail and fail to appear.
In 2017, 43% of aliens released before trial disappeared.
From 1996 to 2017, 37% of aliens released pending trial failed to appear, and 75% of all deportation orders during that period were issued for failure to appear. Nearly one million of these orders remain unenforced.
Despite these systemic failures, studies asserting that sanctuary policies have no effect on crime rates continue to rely on conviction data alone.
The suppression of relevant crime data is not a recent phenomenon.
Under the Obama administration, several foundational crime and drug intelligence programs were dismantled, widening the existing data gap.
The National Drug Intelligence Center (NDIC), which had served for 19 years as the nation’s primary hub for strategic domestic counterdrug intelligence, was closed in 2012.
NDIC produced critical reports on drug trafficking organizations, gang activity, and links to terrorism.
That same year, the Arrestee Drug Abuse Monitoring (ADAM) program was discontinued, cutting off a vital source of drug use data among arrestees. These closures eliminated key channels for gathering, analyzing, and distributing actionable intelligence.
Around the same period, the FBI stopped issuing gang intelligence reports, including the National Gang Threat Assessment and National Youth Gang Survey.
Before its end, the Gang Threat Assessment reported that gangs, primarily composed of Latino and Black members, were responsible for over half of violent crimes in many jurisdictions.
CBP data continues to identify criminal aliens involved in drug trafficking, weapons offenses, and homicide, often with gang ties.
Combined with local policies that restrict immigration data sharing, the loss of these programs has hindered law enforcement’s ability to monitor and respond to gang activity and crimes committed by illegal aliens.
Without comprehensive, disaggregated reporting, national crime data remains fragmented and unreliable.
The impact of underreporting is especially significant when accounting for gang-related crime.
Although gang members make up only about 3% of the prison population, they are linked to over 50% of violent incidents in some jurisdictions.
They are twice as likely to reoffend and have violent offense rates three times higher than non-gang delinquents. Despite their small population share, they are responsible for over 11% of all crimes.
Gang affiliation often extends and intensifies criminal careers, amplifying the total impact of gang-related crime, particularly when connected to illegal immigration.
FBI data also show that gang membership is not demographically uniform.
Approximately 46% of gang members are Hispanic or Latino, 35% are Black, 11% are white, and 7% belong to other groups.
With an estimated 33,000 gangs operating nationwide, many are ethnically defined, with race or ethnicity often serving as a criterion for membership.
Compounding the problem, many Democrat-led jurisdictions failed to report crime data. In 2022, only 24% of police departments in New York submitted reports, including major agencies like the NYPD and Suffolk County.
California reported at 49%, omitting Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Oakland. Pennsylvania submitted data from just 9% of departments, Illinois from 52%, and Maryland from 38%.
These gaps in reporting from major urban areas significantly weaken the accuracy and reliability of national crime statistics.
These patterns show how the lack of primary data reporting, combined with policy-driven suppression, leads to distorted conclusions about crime and demographics.
The refusal to track immigration status, the release of suspects without bail, the non-reporting of crime data by jurisdictions, and the dismantling of federal intelligence programs have all contributed to an incomplete picture.
Meanwhile, mainstream media continues to distort data and shape public perception, promoting the belief that open borders are safe, illegal immigrants reduce crime, and that white Christian nationalists pose the greatest security threat.
Under Trump, accurate data will be collected and published through primary sources, but media outlets are likely to dismiss any findings that challenge their narrative as disinformation.
The post The Truth About Crime, Demographics, and Illegal Immigration appeared first on The Gateway Pundit.