The FBI quietly revised its data that purportedly showed a drop in violent crime in the United States, updating it to reflect what Americans in city from coast to coast already knew - crime is actually up.
Just don’t expect the Biden/Harris administration to update their talking points anytime soon.
The FBI had previously released their 2022 crime data report along with a statement in October of 2023 claiming that “national violent crime decreased an estimated 1.7% in 2022 compared to 2021 estimates.”
But the bureau’s new statistics, as first reported by RealClearInvestigations, tell a much different story, revealing the number of violent crimes - which include murders, rapes, and assaults - actually went up from 1,197,903 in 2021 to 1,256,671 in 2022.
For those who don’t math, that’s a 4.5% increase, and a 6.3 percentage point increase from what the FBI had previously claimed.
Broken down by crime, 2022 saw 1,699 more murders, 7,780 more rapes, 33,459 more robberies, and 37,091 more aggravated assaults than 2021, for a total of 80,029 more violent crimes than had been previously reported.
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Which means a whole lot of people should be spending today wiping the copious amounts of egg off their smug faces. The leftwing media, the Democrat Party, the Biden/Harris administration, and the Harris/Walz campaign have all used the old FBI report to “fact-check” claims by former President Donald Trump and his running mate, JD Vance, that crime has increased under the Biden administration - a claim that, based on this newly updated FBI information, has now been proven accurate.
ABC’s David Muir, for instance, publicly disputed Trump’s claim during a presidential debate last month that crime was up in major cities, pointing to the now-defunct FBI report and telling Trump - and the public who were watching - that data showed “overall violent crime is coming down in this country.”
Whoopsie daisy.
Carl Moody, an economics professor at the College of William & Mary who specializes in crime studies, told RealClearInvestigations that the revisions to FBI reports aren’t typical, and he can’t recall any changes this big being made to bureau crime reports in the past two decades, at least.
“I have checked the data on total violent crime from 2004 to 2022. There were no revisions from 2004 to 2015, and from 2016 to 2020, there were small changes of less than one percentage point,” he said.
“The huge changes in 2021 and 2022, especially without an explanation, make it difficult to trust the FBI data,” Moody added.
The FBI has already released their 2023 crime data, which is now being called into question for its accuracy.
