The latest batch of nationwide FBI crime data, released Monday, shows that in 2014, violent crime in the U.S. continued its long decline. The murder rate was down. The robbery rate was down, too.

"The story is actually better than we all anticipated it would be," says John Roman, a senior fellow at the Urban Institute's Justice Policy Center. "Violence is down a little bit. Property crime is down a lot… and all of this suggests that crime in America is continuing to move in the right direction.”

Earlier this month, I joined a number of fact-checkers in pointing out that a breathless New York Times story, "Murder Rates Rising Sharply in Many U.S. Cities," was misleading. The 30 cities cited by the Times weren't randomly selected; rather, they appeared to suggest their own selection because they were cities that had experienced a recent rise in killings.

That the Times got that story wrong mattered because it appeared right in the middle of a debate over the existence of a so-called “Ferguson Effect”—the (false) idea that the Black Lives Matter movement has somehow been emboldening criminals. But a Vera Institute of Justice senior research fellow looked at the most recent homicide data from 16 of the 20 most populous U.S. cities, and found that just three showed a statistically significant increase. And homicide rates often fluctuate; in recent years, Chicago's has moved both up and down, pointing to no real trend at all.