News Coverage of our Real Clear Investigations Piece on “Stealth Edit: FBI Quietly Revises Violent Crime Stats”
Former President Donald Trump has been hit with numerous “fact-checks” on the campaign trail that have cited FBI statistics to maintain violent crime is falling in America.
However, the bureau quietly adjusted its figures for 2022 in recent weeks — and the new numbers show that offenses actually ticked up overall.
The apparent stealth edit to the bureau’s statistics, first reported by RealClearInvestigations, shows that the raw number of violent crime incidents — including murders, assaults and rapes — rose to 1,256,671 in 2022 from 1,197,930 in 2021, an increase of 4.9%.
Initially, the bureau projected that the violent crime rate relative to the US population had slipped by 2.1% in 2022 compared to 2021.
But the FBI’s adjustment now suggests that the rate of violent crime actually jumped by about 4.5% over the same period.
The upward revision went unmentioned in the bureau’s annual crime figures press release from September of this year, which announced that violent crime dropped by roughly 3% year-over-year in 2023.
The Crime Prevention Research Center first identified the FBI’s subtle fix, citing a spreadsheet breaking down the original data. . . .
“The question naturally arises: should the FBI’s 2023 numbers be believed?” John Lott, an economist who worked under Trump at the justice department, wrote in the RealClearInvestigations piece.
Kamala Harris, the vice president and Democratic presidential candidate, has cited the latest FBI statistics as a sign of how she and Mr Biden are cracking down on crime.
“New data submitted to the FBI confirms that our dedicated efforts and collaborative partnerships with law enforcement are working,” she said after the 2023 figures were released in September.
“Americans are safer now than when we took office. Our progress is continuing this year and builds on substantial decreases during the previous years of our administration.”
Ms Harris, who frequently touts her credentials as a prosecutor in her campaign for the White House, added: “While we have made great progress, we are not stopping now.”
The FBI has been approached for comment by The Telegraph.
The Federal Bureau of Investigation’s 2023 crime data news release did not mention that the violent crime rate was adjusted in 2022 after the initial data was released, wrote John R. Lott Jr., president of the Crime Prevention Research Center, in a RealClearPolitics investigative report on Wednesday.
In September 2023, the FBI reported that the nation’s violent crime rate fell by 2.1% but the FBI “quietly revised those numbers, releasing new data that shows violent crime increased in 2022 by 4.5%,” according to RealClearPolitics.
Lott wrote that the FBI website that states that the 2022 “violent crime rate has been updated for inclusion in CIUS, 2023.” . . .
“After Democrats and journalists have spent the entire election cycle claiming that crime is down,” wrote Greg Price on X, sharing a graph from the Crime Prevention Research Center, “the FBI three weeks before an election revises their crime statistics showing that crime increased by 4.5% in 2022 instead of dropping 2.1%. Incredible.”
RealClearPolitics first noted a “stealth edit” made by Bureau officials in their crime data from 2022 through September 2023 where initial data showed violent crime falling by 2.1% during that period. On Wednesday, RCP reported that the FBI report now shows violent crime rose by 4.5% in that time span, vindicating President Trump and the families of murder victims who say a secure southern border may have saved their loved ones from tragic ends. In a press release last month, the FBI public relations team made no mention of the drastic change.
Even if one knew where to look, the new numbers don’t immediately pop out. Reporter John R. Lott Jr. wrote that he first noticed a cryptic line in an FBI update to the website which stated, “The 2022 violent crime rate has been updated for inclusion in CIUS, 2023.” The only way to see the change, he wrote, was to download the current data and compare it to the previously posted data which has since been removed.
It’s doubtful whether media outlets that dutifully covered the “drop” in violent crime will now acknowledge that rates have gone up. Shortly after the FBI released last year’s data, a headline in USA Today screamed, “Violent crime dropped for third straight year in 2023, including murder and rape.” Carl Moody, a professor at the College of William & Mary who specializes in studying crime, said the sudden and silent change made FBI figures “hard to trust” for him going forward. “The huge changes in 2021 and 2022, especially without an explanation, make it difficult to trust the FBI data,” he told RCP. “It is up to the FBI to explain what they have done, and they haven’t explained these large changes,” Dr. Thomas Marvell, the president of Justec Research, a criminal justice statistical research organization, added. . . .
Crime is the third-ranking voter concern. Negative attacks on Harris should emphasize that violent crime has risen steadily during her vice presidency. Last week, the FBI admitted that instead of falling under the Biden-Harris administration, the overall crime and murder rates have risen. Dr. John Lott of the Crime Prevention Center has documented the data. The media can’t be trusted to report this honestly, so the Trump team will have to do it through advertising. . . .
John Roberts, “How Trump can close the deal,” Washington Examiner, October 17, 2024.
President Donald Trump has repeatedly suggested that crime is far worse than government officials care to admit, particularly in Democrat-run cities.
Democratic operatives and the liberal media have claimed the reverse is true, citing incomplete FBI data indicating a drop in violent crime in the first two years of the Biden-Harris administration.
It appears that Trump was correct when he toldTime magazine that the “FBI fudged the numbers” and possibly also when he suggestedduring the second presidential debate that the FBI data “was a fraud” — just as he appears to have been correct about U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics’ bogus jobs numbers.
The Crime Prevention Research Center recently reported that the FBI stealthily changed its crime data for 2022 — a year in which cities like Phoenix, New York City, and Los Angeles failed to submit crime data.
Whereas the bureau originally claimed that violent crime fell by 2.1% that year — a claim USA Todayand other publications have made ample use of for Democrat officials’ benefit — the FBI subsequently adjusted its statistics to reflect that violent crime actually spiked by at least 4.5%. . . .
But the director of the Crime Prevention Research Center says not to believe believe media reports that crime is declining, and statistics from the Department of Justice’s Bureau of Justice Statistics appear to support him. From 2019 to 2023, violent crime victimization increased by more than 20 percent, excluding simple assault. . . .
Jeremy G. Weber, “Statistical controversy is no crime,” The Hill, October 17, 2024.
An investigation by RealClearInvestigations found that the FBI updated its 2022 crime statistics in September, showing that rather than a 2.1% drop in violent crime as originally reported, the United States actually experienced a 4.5% rise in violent crime. The new dataset showed thousands more murders, rapes, robberies, and aggravated assaults.
Former President Donald Trump has been hit with numerous “fact-checks” on the campaign trail that have cited FBI statistics to maintain violent crime is falling in America. . . .
The Crime Prevention Research Center first identified the FBI’s subtle fix, citing a spreadsheet breaking down the original data. . . .
As John R. Lott Jr. explains once again via 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.
After the FBI released its new crime data in September, a USA Today headline read: “Violent crime dropped for third straight year in 2023, including murder and rape.”
It’s been over three weeks since the FBI released the revised data. The Bureau’s lack of acknowledgment or explanation about the significant change concerns researchers.
“I have checked the data on total violent crime from 2004 to 2022,” Carl Moody, a professor at the College of William & Mary who specializes in studying crime, told RealClearInvestigations. “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.”
“It is up to the FBI to explain what they have done, and they haven’t explained these large changes,” Dr. Thomas Marvell, the president of Justec Research, a criminal justice statistical research organization, told RCI.
The FBI did not respond to RCI’s repeated requests for comment.
Extensive Revisions in Violent Crime Stats
The actual changes in crimes are extensive. 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? . . .
John R. Lott, a respected researcher who wrote the article, notes that “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.”
This is much more in line with a lot of what people are experiencing. Crime is high. Everyone knows it except the ‘experts’ and ‘politicians’ who are responsible for the mess and whose job is to cover it up. . . .
Staff, “FBI Faked Crime Drop By Leaving Out 1,699 Murders,” Washington Standard, October 17, 2024.
It’s no secret that the Biden-Harris administration has been lying to us – publishing positive economic data that they tout, while quietly revising lowermonths later after achieving their desired result.
Now we find out that they’ve also been lying about crime statistics – something that author John R. Lott has been tracking and covering extensively.
— Buttigieg’s ‘Crime Down Under Biden’ Claim Doesn’t Hold Up: John Lott Jr.
— FBI Data On Active Shootings Is Misleading: John Lott Jr.
— Media Push Misleading Crime Stats To Protect Democrat Narrative
“For some reason, the media, they did pick the crime data that they think goes and makes the Democrats look as good as possible. And then even when the crime data that they’ve relied on turns out by the very source of that data to be wrong, none of them fix it,” John Lott, the founder and president of the Crime Prevention Research Center, told Fox News Digital in a Zoom interview this week.
The FBI released its annual Crime in the Nation data for 2022 last year, which found a 2.1% decrease in violent crimes compared to 2021, Lott explained.
The data was lauded by Democrats and the media as part of a turning point for crime woes in the U.S. following the crime wave of 2020, when defund-the-police protests and riots swept the nation, and the pandemic’s stay-at-home orders upended daily life. . . .
M Dowling, “FBI Hid Data: It’s Not Down; It’s Way Up,” Independent Sentinel, October 16, 2024.
With less than two months before the 2024 election the FBI quietly stealth edits their violent crime statistics for 2022 to show a substantial increase in violent crime as opposed to the decrease it showed before – which Democrats have been enthusiastically citing every chance they get.
Real Clear Investigations reporter John R. Lott Jr. said the undisclosed changes in crime statistics show violent crime increased 4.5% in 2022. The FBI’s statistics previously showed a 2.1% drop in violent crime.
Lott said this stealth change, made without any explanation, makes it tough to trust the FBI’s crime statistics.
Here’s more from RCI: . . .
RealClearInvestigations just published a piece by John Lott, revealing that the initial numbers have been very quietly revised from a modest decline in crime to a substantial increase in 2022. The “error” was not minor–it was huge. . . . [Long quote from the RCI piece]
David Strom, “FBI Juked the Crime Stats, Quietly Revises,” Hot Air, October 16, 2024.
Last year, when the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) initially issued its “final” nationwide crime data for 2022, the bureau reported that the country’s violent crime rate decreased by 2.1 percent. Democrats quickly latched onto this purported percent change to counter Donald Trump’s claims that crime is soaring under the Biden-Harris administration.
However, a year later, the FBI has “quietly revised” those numbers, according to a RealClearInvestigations report by crime watchdog Dr. John Lott, correcting the dataset to show that violent crime actually increased in 2022 by 4.5 percent. This means the FBI was way off — by 6.6 percentage points. These additions include thousands more murders, rapes, robberies, and aggravated assaults, Lott says.
The federal law enforcement made no mention of this “stealth edit” in its September 2024 press release.
Lott, who served as senior adviser for research and statistics in the Office of Justice Programs and the Office of Legal Policy at the U.S. Justice Department, discovered this correction through “a cryptic reference” on the FBI website stating: “The 2022 violent crime rate has been updated for inclusion in CIUS, 2023.” The vague editor’s note did not disclose that those figures increased. Lott says the change can only be seen by downloading the FBI’s newly edited crime data and comparing it to the initial file released in 2023.
According to Lott’s analysis, the revisions are “extensive.” There were 80,029 more violent crimes than in 2021, including an additional 1,699 murders, 7,780 rapes, 33,459 robberies, and 37,091 aggravated assaults. How did the FBI originally miss so many murders, given that the vast majority of them are reported to authorities?
“The question naturally arises: should the FBI’s 2023 numbers be believed?” Lott also asks, as the FBI’s initial underreporting casts doubt on the reliability of its data past and present. Raising concerns about data manipulation in the lead-up to the 2024 presidential election, data hawks are also wondering whether the federal agency is fudging the numbers. . . .
When the FBI released its crime statistics for 2022 last September, the agency touted a 2.1% decrease in violent crime. But as Dr. John Lott, head of the Crime Prevention Research Center, has discovered, the FBI quietly revised those stats a few weeks ago, and their most recent data shows violent crime actually increased by 4.5%.
So why didn’t the FBI publicly announce their revised stats instead of burying the crime increase in a brief note on the FBI website? As Lott details, the new figures reveal tens of thousands more crimes than what was originally reported. . . .
While that’s undoubtedly the case, Lott spoke to several criminal justice experts who were troubled by the FBI essentially hiding their revised crime data pointing to a rise in violent offenses in 2022. . . .
RealClearInvestigations (RCI) has discovered that the bureau stealth-edited its crime stats for 2022, and that change doesn’t look so good for Democrats.
“When the FBI originally released the ‘final’ crime data for 2022 in September 2023, it reported that the nation’s violent crime rate fell by 2.1%,” John R. Lott Jr. writes at RCI. “This quickly became, and remains, a Democratic Party talking point to counter Donald Trump’s claims of soaring crime.”
“But the FBI has quietly revised those numbers, releasing new data that shows violent crime increased in 2022 by 4.5%,” Lott adds. “The new data includes thousands more murders, rapes, robberies, and aggravated assaults.”
A 6.6% revision isn’t a negligible amount, yet the FBI hasn’t mentioned the change, even though it’s been three weeks since the revision. The bureau’s September 2024 press releasedoesn’t mention the higher crime numbers, although it harps on “hate crimes” as though they’re the most important issue.
“With the adjustments, there is a net increase of 80,029 more violent crimes, 1,699 more murders, 7,780 more rapes, 33,459 more robberies, and 37,091 more aggravated assaults,” the Crime Prevention Research Center (CPRC) points out. Again, numbers like these are nothing to sneeze at. . . .
