No crime statistics can ever be trusted. It's an intrinsic fallibility of both government bureacracy and human behavior.
The vast majority of most crime will never be reported. Even if it was, most police chiefs are under pressure to reduce the reports, massage the numbers, reclassify the crime as something less severe, etc.
It's not just a western problem, it happens in developed Asian countries like Japan as well. Japan doesn't actually have a crazy high suicide rate compared to western countries like most people think, what they do have is a police force that has been trained to classify all but the most obvious murders as suicides to keep the crime rate low (and sometimes even the most obvious).
It's an open secret that has been going on for decades.
It's not just murder though, their entire police system is set up to avoid taking reports of crime. Almost no one in cities goes to an actual, real police station to report crimes, what they go to is something called a 'koban', which is a sort of mini-station the size of a hot dog stand, koban meaning 'police box'. Here they will take your report of a crime and tell you they'll report it to the higher ups. What they really do is nothing. Asking them to give you any kind of confirmation number that you actually reported a crime will get them angry with you. The average Japanese opinion of their police isn't of fear or distrust, Japs just consider them to be useless. Not worth the time even talking to.