It’s no secret that the Biden-Harris administration has been lying to us – publishing positive economic data that they tout, while quietly revising lower months later after achieving their desired result.
Now we find out that they’ve also been lying about crime statistics – something that author John R. Lott has been tracking and covering extensively.
- Buttigieg’s ‘Crime Down Under Biden’ Claim Doesn’t Hold Up: John Lott Jr.
- FBI Data On Active Shootings Is Misleading: John Lott Jr.
- Media Push Misleading Crime Stats To Protect Democrat Narrative
Now we find they’ve been lying about crime stats too.
In September 2023, the FBI released the “final” crime data for 2022 – showing that the nation’s violent crime rate fell by 2.1% – which Democrats used to counter Donald Trump’s claims that crime has been soaring.
Now we find that the FBI has quietly revised those numbers – and that crime actually increased by 4.5% in 2022 (4.9% in absolute terms)…
Breaking it down by type of crime, we see that property crime and larceny/theft were the top changes, followed by aggravated assault, burglary, rape, and motor vehicle theft.
And of course, the Bureau made absolutely no mention of these revisions in their September 2024 press release.
And of course, ABC used the bad data to fact-check Trump during a debate.
Flashback: ABC’s @DavidMuir “fact checks” Trump during debate, falsely claims crime is down pic.twitter.com/r4uTckozVq
— Tom Elliott (@tomselliott) October 16, 2024
As John R. Lott Jr. explains once again via RealClearInvestigations, RCI discovered the change through a cryptic reference on the FBI website that states: “The 2022 violent crime rate has been updated for inclusion in CIUS, 2023.” But there is no mention that the numbers increased. One only sees the change by downloading the FBI’s new crime data and comparing it to the file released last year.
After the FBI released its new crime data in September, a USA Today headline read: “Violent crime dropped for third straight year in 2023, including murder and rape.”
It’s been over three weeks since the FBI released the revised data. The Bureau’s lack of acknowledgment or explanation about the significant change concerns researchers.
“I have checked the data on total violent crime from 2004 to 2022,” Carl Moody, a professor at the College of William & Mary who specializes in studying crime, told RealClearInvestigations. “There were no revisions from 2004 to 2015, and from 2016 to 2020, there were small changes of less than one percentage point. The huge changes in 2021 and 2022, especially without an explanation, make it difficult to trust the FBI data.”
“It is up to the FBI to explain what they have done, and they haven’t explained these large changes,” Dr. Thomas Marvell, the president of Justec Research, a criminal justice statistical research organization, told RCI.
The FBI did not respond to RCI’s repeated requests for comment.
Extensive Revisions in Violent Crime Stats
The actual changes in crimes are extensive. The updated data for 2022 report that there were 80,029 more violent crimes than in 2021. There were an additional 1,699 murders, 7,780 rapes, 33,459 robberies, and 37,091 aggravated assaults. The question naturally arises: should the FBI’s 2023 numbers be believed?
Without the increase, the drop in violent crime in 2023 would have been less than half as large – only 1.6% instead of the reported drop of 3.5%.
The FBI isn’t the only government agency that has been revising its data. The Bureau of Labor Statistics massively overestimated the number of jobs created during the year that ended in March by 818,000 people.
The FBI’s crime stats revisions reveal how much guesswork is involved in even the “final” numbers often seized on by politicians. The FBI doesn’t simply count reported crimes. Instead, it offers estimates by extrapolating data from police departments that report only partial-year data. The Bureau also makes estimates for cities that report no data. The FBI’s method of generating these estimates changes over time, and it affects the figures they report.
Unfortunately that is simply not true.
The argument made by Trump and challenged by the liberal media, is whether crime has increased under Biden. It has – and very dramatically – according to the DOJ’s Bureau of Justice Statistics NCVS annual survey. Here are the facts https://t.co/1IbAX0ZDhe
— zerohedge (@zerohedge) September 27, 2024
“The [FBI’s] processes, such as how it tries to ‘estimate’ unreported figures, has long been a black box, even to the Bureau of Justice Statistics – the Department of Justice’s actual statistical agency,” says Jeffrey Anderson, who headed the DOJ’s Bureau of Justice Statistics from 2017 to 2021.
Anderson said when he headed the Bureau of Justice Statistics, “We definitely would have highlighted in a press release or a report the 6.6% change recorded for 2022, which moved the numbers from a drop to a rise in violent crime.”
Many Crimes Are Unreported
Another problem with FBI crime data is its reliance on reported crimes. Most crimes go unreported, with only about 45% of violent crimes and 30% of property crimes brought to the police’s attention, according to the National Crime Victimization Survey. Since the FBI only tracks reported incidents and this gap is so large, researchers argue that when the media discusses crime rates based on FBI data, they should clarify that it reflects “reported” crime, not give the impression that total crime is changing.
Nonreporting of crime doesn’t affect all crimes equally. Nonreporting of murder and motor vehicle theft is relatively rare. In murder cases, victims can’t be overlooked, and for auto theft, insurance claims require police reports. However, it’s difficult to fully trust even these numbers because the FBI underreported 1,699 murders and 54,216 motor vehicle thefts in 2022, casting doubt on the reliability of the data.
Continue reading: Breitbart.com
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