That's one of the reasons murder is used. Hard to fudge the statistics on it, immune to overpolicing, most of it is intra-racial, and it's hard to misidentify a perpetrator so bad that they go from white to black.

But for non-murder, there is the National Crime Victimization Survey, that does not involve the police, and acts as a check on their data: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Crime_Victimization_S...

This article is instantly discredited for me because it pretends to know the cause of the drop in violent crime in the 90s.

That being said, the data itself looks solid and given that gun control isn’t happening anytime soon, we need to look at alternative solutions.

Unfortunately, IMO, the BLM movement focused on the wrong side of the equation. Instead of focusing on the police side of the equation, the focus should have been on increasing funding for non police interventions that are known to reduce crime, often significantly.

These include funding for community policing, after school programs, youth recreation centers, basketball leagues and courts, anti gang messaging, etc.

Even on the police side, there should have been a stronger focus on better incarceration procedures which separate gang members from non gang members and prevent non violent criminals from being locked up with violent criminals and gang members, which only end up feeding the gang pipeline.

Mandatory life sentences for everyone who uses them to murder someone else.