Prepare your shocked face. The FBI has secretly edited its violent crime data to show the rate of violent crimes has not decreased as claimed previously. This comes after a whole year of Democrat politicians and the media “fact-checking”, any Republican who said that crime was a growing problem in the United States.
Real Clear Investigations discovered the data change. The new data shows a reverse from a decrease of 2.1 percent to an increase of 4.5 percent.
The FBI reported in September 2023 that violent crime rates had fallen by 2.1%. This became and still is a Democratic Party talking point to counter Donald Trump’s claims about a soaring crime rate.
The FBI quietly revised these numbers and released new data showing that violent crime in 2022 increased by 4.5%. The FBI’s new statistics include thousands more murders and violent crimes, including rapes, thefts, and assaults.
As of yet, data for 2024 has not been compiled. If the FBI’s 2022 data was so inaccurate, then why should anyone trust their 2023 data which claims that violent crime has decreased by three percent? Will those data also be revised in the future? We can probably make a good guess about that.
The FBI, as expected, did not make public this abrupt and dramatic change in numbers. The FBI did not mention the revision in its annual press release about crime rates released in September.
In its press release of September 2024, the Bureau – at the center of partisan storms — did not mention these revisions.
RCI found out about the change by a cryptic statement on the FBI’s website. It reads: “The violent crime rate for 2022 has been updated to include in CIUS 2023.” However, there is no mention of the fact that the numbers have increased. The only way to see the difference is by downloading the FBI’s latest crime data and comparing them with the file released last summer.
Democrat politicians, and their media allies, have repeatedly claimed that Joe Biden and Kamala Harris were responsible for a decline in violent crime. This “fact” was a central part of the Harris campaign. Many news outlets condemned any Republican who claimed violent crime had increased.
But those with eyes or any kind of sense perception were always skeptical.
The fact that 40 percent of the police departments no longer shared crime data with the FBI could not be ignored. The FBI was forced to rely on an estimation system that is questionable in order to publish its crime statistics.
Even the “final” crime statistics often used by politicians are based on a lot of guesswork. The FBI does not simply count crimes reported. The FBI extrapolates data from police departments that only report partial-year data to make estimates. The bureau makes estimates also for cities that do not report data. The FBI’s methods of generating these estimations change over time and affect the figures reported.
Next, someone might wonder if these revisions were normal. Simply put, they’re not. Carl Moody of William and Mary College looked at past years and found no revisions between 2004 and 2015. From 2016 to 2020, there were only minor changes, less than 1 percent. The FBI didn’t start producing massive revisions until Biden Harris became president.
This is a huge deal. Since the beginning of the Democratic Party, the idea that violent crimes are “down” was a major part of their politics. Will the media report on the changes that have flipped the narrative? Answer: Almost certainly not.
