evidence: During the pandemic, the country saw a significant uptick in homicides, shootings and aggravated assaults, which likely contributed to the increase seen in data reported by law enforcement. At the same time, violent crime victimizations — which included less acute forms of violent crime, such as assaults without weapons that did not lead to serious injuries — dipped. These violent crime victimizations mostly went unreported. [...] For some observers, the jump in serious violent crime was always bound to stabilize, as the shock from the early pandemic wore off. "Violent crime rates had been trending down for at least a decade. And when the pandemic hit, unsurprisingly, with this once-in-a-century event, you saw things shift," said Kim Foxx, state’s attorney for Cook County, Illinois. "As we are coming out of the pandemic, the fact that we are now seeing those numbers trend downward again is not surprising to me." [...] These data gaps and disagreements create more space for politicians to spin unsubstantiated, murky narratives. When Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis announced his run for president, for example, he touted that Florida’s crime rate has reached a record-low under his administration. But he failed to mention that he relied on a crime rate estimation that was missing data from about half of the state’s law enforcement agencies, which policed 40% of the state’s population.