Homicides are generally considered pretty reliable for statistics, and those have gone down. Though it's possible for those to go down while lower level crimes go up.
It's easy for any one agency or police department to cook the books, but I don't think that scales to the kind of huge shift across multiple categories and data sources shown in the article.
Right, there are definitely perverse incentives afoot from a reporting standpoint on the part of police departments. Additionally, my allusion to the opiate issue is meant to convey that - while a horde of drug addicts at the train station may not actually commit a crime, they certainly make the place feel less safe, which is what people actually experience.
The BJS crime stats are suspect, at best. Instead of relying on actual reports, it's based on polling with a series of interviews. I'm sure that is really reliable in the poor and wealthy neighborhoods. - https://bjs.ojp.gov/data-collection/ncvs#1-0
