Biden’s FBI quietly revises 2022 crime stats for the more severe

This week President Biden as soon as once more took a victory lap on crime, trumpeting preliminary FBI knowledge on traits in 2024.

“Communities throughout our nation are safer now than after I took workplace,” he bragged in an official assertion.

But, with crime a central concern on this yr’s election, he and the mainstream media have fastidiously ignored proof that the FBI could also be fudging its numbers — very like the best way the Bureau of Labor Statistics massively overestimated the variety of jobs created in the course of the Biden-Harris administration.

Final month, new FBI knowledge confirmed that reported critical violent crime (homicide, rape, theft, and aggravated assault) fell by 3.5% in 2023. 

However on the identical time — and rather more quietly — the FBI revised its earlier knowledge for 2022, turning a reported lower right into a worrisome enhance in violent crime.

Final yr, the media trumpeted the FBI’s declare that reported violent crime had fallen in 2022 by 2.1%. 

However now the FBI admits that violent crime rose in 2022 as an alternative, by 4.5% — off by 6.6 proportion factors.

These up to date numbers resulted in a web enhance in 2022 over 2021 of 80,029 violent crimes: 1,699 murders, 7,780 rapes, 33,459 robberies and 37,091 aggravated assaults.

It’s a regarding change concerning a extremely politicized subject. A Gallup ballot discovered in March that “crime and violence” was People’ second largest concern, after inflation. 

For a few years now, the mainstream media has been operating headlines reminiscent of this from NBC Information: “Most individuals assume the U.S. crime fee is rising. They’re fallacious.” 

USA Right now’s tackle the 2023 FBI crime knowledge was typical: “Violent crime dropped for second straight year in 2023, including murder and rape.”

But don’t count on the media to let folks know that each one the headlines over the past yr had been fallacious — or that 2022’s enhance was higher than the reported 2023 drop.

Maybe the FBI’s latest numbers received’t be revised upward subsequent yr, after the election has safely handed. 

However even when we take them at face worth, it’s essential to tell apart reported crime from complete crime. 

We now have recognized for many years that the majority crimes aren’t reported to the police. That’s why the US Division of Justice gives a measure of complete crime, which incorporates each reported and unreported crime. 

And the outcomes of the Division of Justice’s Bureau of Justice Statistics 2023 Nationwide Crime Victimization Survey, launched in mid-September, inform a really completely different story. 

Since victims don’t report most crimes, the NCVS interviews 240,000 folks every year about their private experiences. 

As an alternative of the FBI’s 3.5% drop in critical violent crime, the NCVS discovered a 4.1% increase in violent crime victimization from 2022 to 2023. 

Whereas the FBI claims that critical violent crime has fallen by 5.8% since Biden took workplace, the NCVS numbers present that complete violent crime has risen by an incredible 55.4%. Rapes had been up by 42%, theft by 63%, and aggravated assault by 55% throughout his time period. 

The will increase proven by the NCVS in the course of the Biden-Harris administration are by far the most important proportion will increase over another three-year interval, greater than doubling the earlier file.

If we compare 2023 rates with 2019’s pre-COVID violent crime charges, the FBI’s new knowledge present nearly no enchancment — only a 0.2% drop — whereas the NCVS reveals a 19% enhance in that point interval.

A lot has been product of the current decline in homicide charges. However whereas homicide charges fell by 16.2% from 2020 to 2023, they nonetheless exceed pre-COVID ranges by a major 9.6%.

The mainstream media’s therapy of those statistics has been shameful.

Even after the NCVS knowledge was launched and former President Donald Trump mentioned them in a press convention, most shops solely famous the brand new numbers in “reality checks” that sought to dismiss their significance

The underside line: Trump is appropriate that violent crime has elevated considerably in the course of the Biden-Harris administration.

He has additionally been appropriate to level out that many police departments not report their knowledge to the FBI. 

In 2023, 21% of departments together with giant cities like New York and Los Angeles, despatched no crime figures to the FBI. One other 24% of police departments solely partially reported crime knowledge in 2022, the final yr accessible.

The mainstream media refuses to say any knowledge that doesn’t match their narrative. 

However People in lots of elements of the nation see the consequences of rising crime day-after-day, from locked-up merchandise within the native Walgreens to fixed information about assaults within the subway. 

We all know that our lives weren’t like this a number of years in the past.

John R. Lott Jr. is president of the Crime Prevention Research Center. He served as senior adviser for analysis and statistics within the Workplace of Justice Applications and the Workplace of Authorized Coverage on the Justice Division.