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Crime and data expert John Lott spoke to Fox News Digital regarding how the FBI updated its violent crime stats for 2022, showing an increase in violent crimes, not a decrease.
President of the Crime Prevention Research Center John R. Lott Jr. has stumbled across some seriously sketchy data released by the FBI.
“We all remember the infamous fact-check in the presidential debate when Donald Trump was talking about increasing crime rates and ABC News was like, ‘There has not been increasing crime rates according to the FBI,’” Liz Wheeler of “The Liz Wheeler Show” tells John.
“This, you have found, is false,” she adds. . . .
BlazeTV Staff, “SHOCKING: FBI BUSTED for sketchy crime data,” Blazemedia, October 20, 2024.
The agency’s criteria for a reported crime does not necessarily include all 911 calls, which artificially depresses the number of crimes reflected in the national data in certain cases, Crime Prevention Research Center Director John Lott told the DCNF.
“In order for the FBI to count it, a police report has to be filled out,” Lott said. “Over the last few years, we have a situation where if you call a 911 operator and you say it’s not an emergency, or that the criminal has gone away, you’d have to go down to the police station to fill out a police report.” . . .
The latter narrative took a hit recently when the FBI quietly revised its 2022 numbers, which initially indicated a 2.1 percent drop in violent crime. Economist John R. Lott Jr., president of the Crime Prevention Research Center, found that the revised numbers indicate a 4.5 percent rise in the reported violent crime rate, which you can see in this FBI Excel file. Last month, the FBI estimated a 3 percent drop in reported violent crime between 2022 and 2023, which Lott says would have been half as large but for the change in the 2022 numbers.
Lott says the FBI publicly noted that upward revision only with a vague statement that “the 2022 violent crime rate has been updated.” He and other critics argue that the FBI’s reticence makes it hard to trust the agency’s data: If the FBI’s 2022 “update” changed a decrease into an increase, can we be confident that something similar won’t happen with the 2023 numbers? What about the FBI’s preliminary numbers for 2024, which indicate a 10.3 percent drop in reported violent crime between the first half of last year and the first half of this year? . . .
One factor could be a drop in the share of crimes reported to police, which according to the NCVS fell from 45.6 percent in 2021 to 41.5 percent in 2022. Lott suggests another possible explanation in his Real Clear Investigations piece about the FBI’s revised 2022 numbers:
Over the past few years, the number of police officers has declined because of cuts in budgets and many retirements. One result is that police departments nationwide—from Charlottesville and Henrico County, Va., to Chicago, Ill. and Olympia, Wash.—are no longer responding to calls unless the perpetrator is still there actively committing the crime. Instead of police coming out to investigate and take a report, residents in those jurisdictions can still go to the police station and wait in line to get a police report filled out. In addition, despite the widespread belief that calling 911 is enough to report a crime, the FBI officially doesn’t tally 911 calls. It only counts crimes when police make out an official report.
By contrast, Lott says in an email, the NCVS may record crimes as reported to police even when there is no official report because “people believe calling up 911 counts as reporting a crime.” . . .
John Lott, founder and president of the Crime Prevention Research Center, told Fox News Digital that when the FBI released its annual crime data for 2022 last year, it showed a 2.1% decrease in violent crime compared to 2021. Democrats seized on that report to claim their policies (whatever they are) had led to a reduction in crime, which they said blew holes in Donald Trump and Republicans’ claims that the current administration’s policies on crime and the border were working. Not so much.
The revised data showed a net increase of 80,029 violent crimes in 2022 over 2021. Lott told Fox that under the definition of violent crime, there were an additional 1,699 murders, 7,780 rapes, 33,459 robberies, and 37,091 aggravated assaults that year.
“To give people an idea of the size of the change, when the 2022 data came out in September 2023, they initially reported that violent crime had fallen by 2.1% in 2022…That’s the final data, supposedly, for 2022. The revision of that final data that came out last month now claims that rather than the 2.1% drop, that there was actually a 4.5% increase in violent crime that occurred in 2022. That’s a 6.6 percentage point change there,” Lott told Fox News Digital.
“It’s from a drop to an increase. And, you know, the bizarre thing to me is, for a year after the 2022 data was put out, we were having headlines, news articles after news articles saying, ‘Violent crime is falling, people mistakenly or erroneously believe that it’s increasing.’ And, you know, and they were relying on this data,” Lott continued. “But you don’t see any corrections in the news, saying, ‘Oops, the FBI data that we relied on was wrong, that rather than a drop, there was actually an increase that had occurred.” . . .
Crime isn’t, in fact, going down. It turns out the FBI’s numbers were phony from the beginning.
The Bureau had initially reported there was a 2.1% drop in violent crimes in 2022. But after a revision to the data set, it admitted in a September 2024 press release that there was actually a 4.5% increase!
As John R. Lott of the Crime Prevention Research Center documents, even this reported increase in crime masks the true extent of it. That’s because an increasing number of crimes are going unreported and unprosecuted. . . .
National Crime Victimization Survey numbers show that total violent crime has risen by a 55% since Joe Biden assumed office.
Robberies, as reported by victims themselves, are up a grim 63%.
If you don’t want to become another addition to those “crimeflation” statistics, then you need to take precautions.
For example, flashing your wealth around by wearing expensive jewelry or watches out in public may no longer be safe (many police departments now specifically warn against it). . . .
As John R. Lott Jr., president of the Crime Prevention Research Center, explains at RealClearInvestigations:
RCI discovered the change through a cryptic reference on the FBI website that states: “The 2022 violent crime rate has been updated for inclusion in CIUS, 2023.” But there is no mention that the numbers increased. One only sees the change by downloading the FBI’s new crime data and comparing it to the file released last year.
The updated data for 2022 report that there were 80,029 more violent crimes than in 2021. There were an additional 1,699 murders, 7,780 rapes, 33,459 robberies, and 37,091 aggravated assaults. The question naturally arises: should the FBI’s 2023 numbers be believed?
“The FBI claims that serious violent crime has fallen by 5.8% since Biden took office, the National Crime Victimization Survey 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 FBI quietly released revised numbers recently that reveal that rather than decreasing by 2.1%, violent crime in 2022 actually increased by 4.5%.
According to original research conducted by John Lott, president of the Crime Prevention Research Center (CPRC), the adjustments represent a net increase of 80,029 more violent crimes, including 1,699 more murders, 7,780 more rapes, 33,459 more robberies and 37,091 more aggravated assaults.
“A major weakness for reported crime data is that most crimes aren’t reported to the police,” Lott said in a report on the revised statistics. “Murder has the advantage because the vast majority of murders are reported. But the revised data for 2021 and 2022 shows a net increase of 1,699 more murders. How do you miss 1,699 murders?”
In an October report posted at RealClearInvestigations (RCI), Lott wrote that even three weeks after the revised numbers were released, the FBI hadn’t bothered to explain—or even acknowledge—the significant change.
“I have checked the data on total violent crime from 2004 to 2022,” said Carl Moody, a professor at the College of William & Mary who specializes in studying crime. “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.”
Moody is also concerned that nobody in the mainstream media is reporting on the important story about the increase.
“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.”
That fact is hammered home by an October report claiming to “fact check” both Trump and Harris on their violent crime claims.
“Crime researchers tell CBS News that while both are valuable metrics, the FBI data Harris cites is more reliable, and she is correct that it suggests violent crime is at a near 50-year low,” the report states, completely ignoring the revised statistics released three weeks earlier. . . .
Mark Chesnut, “FBI Quietly Revises Violent Crime Data,” America’s 1st Freedom, October 24, 2024.
. . . The FBI originally claimed that violent crime fell during 2022 when it published its October 2023 report (the most recent data available). However, Dr. John R. Lott, Jr., head of the Crime Prevention Research Center, broke the news that the FBI secretly updated their data for 2021 and 2022, and the true facts are that violent crime increased 4.5% with 80,029 more violent crimes, 1,699 more murders, 7,780 more rapes, 33,459 more robberies, and 37,091 more aggravated assaults. . . .
Staff, “The Levites, 1643, and Today – Church Security Through the Ages,” News2A, October 25, 2024.
Stealth Edit: FBI Quietly Revises Violent Crime Stats, by Dr. John Lott of the Crime Prevention Research Center, describes how in 2023, the FBI reported that for 2022, “the nation’s violent crime rate fell by 2.1%. This quickly became, and remains, a Democratic Party talking point to counter Donald Trump’s claims of soaring crime.” Subsequently, though, the FBI “quietly revised those numbers, releasing new data that shows violent crime increased in 2022 by 4.5%. … The Bureau –which has been at the center of partisan storms –made no mention of these revisions in its September 2024 press release.” The 6.6% change becomes apparent only after “downloading the FBI’s new crime data and comparing it to the file released last year.”
Lott notes that when the FBI’s data was originally published in September 2023, it was used in a news article that highlighted the importance of crime rates as a “key issue” in the upcoming election, and which credited the Biden-Harris administration’s actions for reductions in violent crime “for the third straight year in 2023.” . . .
On a recent episode of Fox News’ “Gutfeld!”, host Greg Gutfeld took aim at the FBI over a quiet yet significant revision to its 2022 violent crime statistics.
The issue was brought to light by John Lott’s investigative piece for Real Clear Investigations, titled “Stealth Edit: FBI Quietly Revises Violent Crime Stats.”
Initially, the FBI reported that violent crime had dropped by 2.1% in 2022, but as Lott uncovered, the real numbers showed a 4.5% increase.
In his typical comedic style, Gutfeld sarcastically compared the FBI’s revised data to “more fudged than Brian Stelter’s fingertips” and quipped about the drastic swing in the stats being bigger than “the one Joy Behar installed over her bed.” . . .
Staff, “Lott was Right! FBI Revises Violent Crime Stats!,” Guns America, October 212, 2024.
