Crime is one of those issues where you're likely to have a ton of people concerned about it in any given election cycle. Even one violent crime is one too many, really, though getting the violent crime rate to zero is also physically impossible. Still, it's a perpetual issue.
So the stealth editing of the FBI's crime data is an intriguing thing. Especially since we've seen the politicization of the FBI itself.
That's right, I'm suggesting here and now that the data was either intentionally misreported in the initial numbers or the decision to try and revise the numbers up 6.6 percent was in an effort to protect Democrats.
For months now, Republicans have attacked their opponents on crime in general, but a lot of their ire was for the violent crime being committed by illegal immigrants.
Immediately, Democrats defended themselves by arguing that violent crime was down. Look at the FBI data, they said. It's down and that means their policies, if not making things better, aren't making them worse.
Only, we now know that they were much worse.
However, while covering the story, Real Clear Investigations made a notable comment on the data. Two, actually.
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.
“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.”
The first comment is the reminder of how BLS blew it by overestimating the number of jobs. That has largely been a campaign talking point for Democrats up until it couldn't be anymore.
Next, the nature of the FBI's estimating means that it's relatively easy for them to fudge the numbers if they wanted to.
And yes, I believe that to be the case.
As the RCI piece goes on to note:
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.”
If they do, it won't be until after the election. Even then, don't expect it to be released unless it looks good for Democrats.
The truth is that the FBI decided a while ago to support and defend not the Constitution, but the Democratic Party. That means they'll squander your tax dollars in an effort to advance the left's causes.
If they also manage to catch a criminal or two along the way, well, not every agent is a complete sack of feces.
It's primarily the leadership that's the issue.