The FBI recently updated its 2022 violent crime stats, addressing what turned out to be a massive underreporting problem. Prior to this, former President Donald Trump had been fact-checked live during his debate against Vice President Kamala Harris for saying that violent crime was on the rise. He was ridiculed afterward and accused of either getting his information mixed up or flat-out lying. But now it seems Trump was right all along, so the progressive media must be falling all over itself to correct the record in the name of journalistic integrity and accurate reporting – or, at the very least, to wipe the egg off the industry’s face – right?
Not quite.
The FBI Was Silent – And So Was the Anti-Trump Media
First and foremost, credit must be given where it’s due. John R. Lott Jr., of RealClearInvestigations, was the first to discover and break the news. As he explained, the FBI originally released its “final” crime data for 2022 in September of 2023. At the time, it was reported that the overall violent crime rate had fallen by 2.1%. The Bureau dropped numbers in an October 16, 2023, press release, extolling a 6.1% drop in murders and a 5.4% drop in rapes compared to the previous year – remember this announcement, as it will become relevant soon enough. The Democratic Party and the left-wing media quickly seized it as a talking point. And why shouldn’t they? If true, it certainly makes it seem like the Biden-Harris administration had been cleaning up the streets, so to speak.
The update shows that there were actually 80,029 more violent crimes reported to the FBI in 2022 than in 2021. This includes an increase of 1,699 murders, 7,780 rapes, 33,459 robberies, and 37,091 aggravated assaults. So, rather than decreasing by 2.1% in 2022, violent crime increased by 4.5% – a total discrepancy of 6.6%! Now, remember that detailed announcement in 2023? Here’s how the Bureau let everyone know that it had fixed an error in the most recent press release: “The 2022 violent crime rate has been updated for inclusion in CIUS, 2023.” After numbers like that … nothing?
Indeed, even the media continued the lie. As Lott explained in his report, a USA Today headline – published after the update – read: “Violent crime dropped for third straight year in 2023, including murder and rape.” CNN also ran a deceptive story that completely ignored this change. “New FBI statistics show continued drop in US crime in first six months of 2024,” read the September 30 headline. “Crime in the United States dropped throughout the first six months of 2024, according to preliminary figures released Monday by the FBI, continuing a trend in falling crime rates the bureau recently noted for 2023,” the introductory line reads. The self-declared “most trusted name in news” then went on to detail the drop in 2023 numbers over the previous year, but didn’t once mention 2022 directly or the amended stats at all. As Lott put it at the time his article was published, “It’s been over three weeks since the FBI released the revised data. The Bureau’s lack of acknowledgement or explanation about the significant change concerns researchers.”
How Did It Happen?
There are a number of factors that might explain why the FBI’s crime stats were so wrong to begin with. First, there has been a drop in policing nationwide. With fewer cops responding to calls, law enforcement has less crime to address and less to report to the FBI. As well, some crimes are chronically underreported. Rape and other forms of sexual assault, for example, often aren’t reported because the victim – for one reason or another – doesn’t want the exposure. To a lesser degree, robberies can face the same problem.
That doesn’t explain, however, how almost 1,700 extra murders were missed. Generally speaking, homicides tend to leave bodies lying around as evidence they occurred. Even if no suspect is ever arrested, if a body is found and murder is determined to be the cause of death, then law enforcement knows a crime has taken place.
Another potential answer to the “how!?” question is that the system simply fell apart. The FBI reportedly changed the way it tracks violent crime in 2021. That led to the FBI never receiving data from many law enforcement agencies. The FBI is suspected to be missing data from about a fifth of local agencies. Also contributing to the underreporting issue is the fact the Bureau doesn’t count 911 calls – so without these local departments reporting, the federal numbers were bound to be incorrect, and the Bureau knew it.
It calls into question the validity of the 2023 numbers as well. Can that decrease in violent crime be trusted, or will it turn out just as bad? Perhaps the bigger question is, can the FBI be trusted in general? The Bureau was outed for lying about the Hunter Biden laptop scandal. Christopher Wray admitted that they messed up the Trump-Russia probe. Then, going further back, there were the two anti-Trump agents that drew the Bureau into controversy, Peter Strzok and Lisa Page.
Is the Deep State still out to get Trump? To answer yes or no to that question would be pure speculation. However, it is telling that these executive agencies keep getting the data wrong in a way that makes President Biden look good, only to fix those errors later but not tell anyone. Note that no announcement came from the FBI, no media corrections followed, and none of the so-called fact-checkers amended their reports or apologized to the former president. What we do know, however, is that Trump was right all along: Violence has increased under the Biden-Harris administration.
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