Last year, when the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) initially issued its "final" nationwide crime data for 2022, the bureau reported that the country's violent crime rate decreased by 2.1 percent. Democrats quickly latched onto this purported percent change to counter Donald Trump's claims that crime is soaring under the Biden-Harris administration.
However, a year later, the FBI has "quietly revised" those numbers, according to a RealClearInvestigations report by crime watchdog Dr. John Lott, correcting the dataset to show that violent crime actually increased in 2022 by 4.5 percent. This means the FBI was way off — by 6.6 percentage points. These additions include thousands more murders, rapes, robberies, and aggravated assaults, Lott says.
After Democrats and journalists have spent the entire election cycle claiming that crime is down, the FBI three weeks before an election revises their crime statistics showing that crime increased by 4.5% in 2022 instead of dropping 2.1%.
— Greg Price (@greg_price11) October 16, 2024
Incredible. pic.twitter.com/3wgaEsQoID
The federal law enforcement made no mention of this "stealth edit" in its September 2024 press release.
Lott, who served as senior adviser for research and statistics in the Office of Justice Programs and the Office of Legal Policy at the U.S. Justice Department, discovered this correction through "a cryptic reference" on the FBI website stating: "The 2022 violent crime rate has been updated for inclusion in CIUS, 2023." The vague editor's note did not disclose that those figures increased. Lott says the change can only be seen by downloading the FBI's newly edited crime data and comparing it to the initial file released in 2023.
According to Lott's analysis, the revisions are "extensive." There were 80,029 more violent crimes than in 2021, including an additional 1,699 murders, 7,780 rapes, 33,459 robberies, and 37,091 aggravated assaults. How did the FBI originally miss so many murders, given that the vast majority of them are reported to authorities?
"The question naturally arises: should the FBI's 2023 numbers be believed?" Lott also asks, as the FBI's initial underreporting casts doubt on the reliability of its data past and present. Raising concerns about data manipulation in the lead-up to the 2024 presidential election, data hawks are also wondering whether the federal agency is fudging the numbers.
It's been more than three weeks since the FBI released the revised 2022 data, and the bureau has yet to make a public announcement explaining the discrepancy. "The Bureau's lack of acknowledgment or explanation about the significant change concerns researchers," Lott observes.
"This FBI report is stunning because it now doesn't state that violent crime in 2022 was much higher than it had previously reported, nor does it explain why the new rate is so much higher, and it issued no press release about this large revision," David Mustard, a professor at the University of Georgia who extensively researches crime, told Lott. "This lack of transparency harms the FBI’s credibility."
"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, commented. "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, president of Justec Research, a criminal justice statistical research organization, remarked.
The FBI did not respond to Lott's repeated requests for comment.
Lott notes that the FBI's revisions reveal how much guesswork is truly involved.
As Townhall previously covered, the FBI's calculations are not based on simply counting crimes. Instead, it offers estimates by extrapolating data from police departments that report only partial-year data. This includes estimations for cities that fail to report any data to the federal government. According to reporting rates monitored by The Marshall Project, nearly one-third of local law enforcement agencies (31 percent of the 18,000) were MIA from the FBI's 2022 crime statistics.
According to how the U.S. Department of Justice's Bureau of Justice Statistics describes the estimation model:
"It is the statistical process which allows inferences to be made about an outcome of interest in a population (e.g., the number of murders in the United States), even if information about the outcome is only known for part of the population [...] Not all law enforcement agencies submit all their crime data; some provide only partial data, or no data at all, on crimes and arrests."
In other words, the FBI figures are "a guess – albeit an informed guess – built on assumptions to fill in data that is often otherwise known (i.e., the number of homicides in Los Angeles in 2021 – 402)," says the Coalition for Law, Order, and Safety (CLOS), a public safety group comprised of law enforcement officials and analysts. Because the Los Angeles Police Department did not submit data, the FBI inferred what the number would likely have been, despite the data being publicly available.
The FBI's process for estimating unreported figures has "long been a black box," Jeffrey Anderson, who served as director of the Bureau of Justice Statistics from 2017 to 2021, wrote for City Journal.
Anderson says that 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."
Another issue with the FBI crime data is its reliance on reported crimes, Lott notes. Many crimes go unreported; only about 45 percent of violent victimizations and 30 percent of property crimes were brought to the police's attention in 2023, according to the National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS).
Since the FBI only tracks reported incidents, researchers caution that when the media pounce on preliminary crime rates generated by FBI data, they should clarify that it reflects "reported" crime but does not accurately capture America's crime crisis.
Meanwhile, other measurements show sharper rises in crime. More from Lott:
Although recent attention has focused on the decline in murder rates, even with the revised numbers, the 16.2% drop from 2020 to 2023 still leaves murder rates 9.6% higher than pre-COVID levels.
A half-century ago, the DOJ provided a total crime measure, including both reported and unreported crime. The results of the department’s Bureau of Justice Statistics 2023 National Crime Victimization Survey, released in mid-September, tell a very different story from the FBI data.
The NCVS interviews 240,000 people each year about their personal experiences.
Instead of the FBI's 3.5% drop in the reported violent crime rate in 2023, the NCVS found a 4.1% increase in the reported violent crime rate. Even with the revised FBI numbers, in 2022, the FBI's 4.5% increase pales in comparison to the NCVS's 29.1% increase.
[...]
While the FBI claims that serious violent crime has fallen by 5.8% since Biden took office, the NCVS numbers show that total violent crime has risen by 55.4%. Rapes are up by 42%, robbery by 63%, and aggravated assault by 55% during Biden’s term. Since the NCVS started, the largest previous increase over three years was 27% in 2006, so the increase under Biden was slightly more than twice as large.
The increases shown by the NCVS during the Biden-Harris administration are by far the largest percentage increases over any three years, slightly more than doubling the previous record.
Comparing 2023 rates with 2019 pre-COVID violent crime rates, the FBI's new 2023 data show virtually no improvement – just a 0.2% drop – while the NCVS shows a 19% increase over that period. But the news media didn’t cover the crime survey when it was released last month.
'With the media using the 2022 FBI data to tell us for a year that crime was falling, it is disappointing that there are no news articles correcting that misimpression,' Moody told RCI. 'We will have to see whether the FBI later also revises the 2023 numbers.'
NEW - The FBI has silently altered their crime statistics showing a HUGE increase in violent crime.
— Right Angle News Network (@Rightanglenews) October 16, 2024
Originally reported as a 2.1% decrease, the updated data now show a MASSIVE 4.5% increase, including thousands more murders, rapes, and aggravated assaults.
This revision,… pic.twitter.com/pCnQrs22G9