ZeroGravitas says>" it's been trending down most places for decades."<

The problem is that reported crime is a political number: those in power want the number to go down on their watch and they have control of the reporting mechanism. Pressure exists at every level, from patrolmen filling out incident reports to statisticians collating the numbers for the mayor, to move the numbers downward.

There is every reason to be skeptical of reported criminal statistical trends in USA cities today.

Where is the alternative "true" numbers?

Police have every incentive to do the opposite of what you say. Why else fund them?

The police have bosses, and the bosses want to have careers. From The Wire: S04E09.

    Pryzbylewski: I don't get it. All this so we score higher on the state tests? If we're teaching the kids the test questions, what is it assessing in them?
    Sampson: Nothing. It assesses us. The test scores go up, they can say the schools are improving. The scores stay down, they can't.
    Pryzbylewski: Juking the stats.
    Sampson: Excuse me?
    Pryzbylewski: Making robberies into larcenies. Making rapes disappear. You juke the stats, and majors become colonels. I've been here before.
    Sampson: Wherever you go, there you are.

It's unfortunate that the "crime is higher than reported" narrative has been hijacked by bootlickers who are chomping at the bit for a pretext to sic the military on large cities, but the underlying idea that crime statistics can be gamed for the sake of self-interest isn't wrong.

How is a patrolman lying about a helping himself?

It seems nuts to claim the year over year national drops in crime are all gaming stats comp. I’m positive there is some of this going on, but an effort like that to suppress crime statistics on a national level doesn’t pass the sniff test, you’re saying no cops retired and then blow the whistle? That everywhere in America is doing this and nobody notices(enough)?

Similarly some cops are actual criminals and totally corrupt. Like Taglione, or the Baltimore gun trace task force, but that sure as hell doesn’t mean everyone is.

Do you think police are systematically underreporting crime to the tune of like multiple decades lows?

I hear this "crime is down" theme a lot. But I see with my own eyes, in my own neighborhood, that the opposite is happening. Other people do as well and that is a big reason why the news media is viewed negatively.

Crime is certainly down, assuming you live in a developed country that isn’t one of a couple massively regressing ones.

You are displaying a bias here. Unless there is a “itbeho’s neighborhood gazette” reporting exclusively on what you see through your front window and THEY’RE saying there is no increase in crime then your complaint doesn’t hold.

My grandfather, in the US, was waylaid by actual bandits operating openly on a major US highway in the 1970s. In some cities you couldn’t take public transport without almost surely being victimized.

Crime is very much down and that’s especially true for large cities. Maybe you’ve become overly fixated on the topic or maybe your neighborhood is an outlier but that doesn’t make the statistics “wrong”.