> Police and prosecutors can and do make mistakes, inadvertently or sometimes prejudiciously.

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...