FBI secretly revises data; reveals violent crime actually increased
The FBI secretly revised its data last month to reflect an increase in crime, a report has found.
When it published its crime stats in September 2023, the FBI told Americans crime had fallen in 2022 by 2.1%. This claim fueled media talking points that crime has declined under the Biden-Harris administration, even as most Democrats admit that crime is soaring and voters see it as a major concern. When conservatives such as Donald Trump have accused the administration of allowing crime to skyrocket, they have been “fact-checked” by mainstream media outlets.
Last week, however, a report found that the FBI had recently changed those statistics to show a 4.5% increase in violent crime. The bureau did not announce this significant change and failed to mention it in its recent press release. But an innocuous reference on the FBI’s website caught the eye of RealClearInvestigations (RCI), which downloaded the new data and compared it with the old.
The new crime stats revealed that 2022 saw 80,029 more violent crimes than the year before. These included 37,091 aggravated assaults, 1,699 murders, 33,459 robberies, and 7,780 rapes.
‘Difficult to trust FBI data’
Some are now questioning the FBI’s crime data for 2023, which shows a 3.5% decline in crime.
“The question naturally arises: should the FBI’s 2023 numbers be believed?” wrote RCI in its report.
Carl Moody, a crime analyst at the College of William & Mary, told RCI that this major revision makes it “difficult to trust FBI data.”
“I have checked the data on total violent crime from 2004 to 2022,” Carl Moody, a crime analyst at the College of William & Mary, told RCI. “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.”
“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,” he added. “We will have to see whether the FBI later also revises the 2023 numbers.”
How does the FBI get its data?
Rather than count reported crimes, the FBI collects partial crime reports from local police departments which it then uses to generate estimates.
“The [FBI’s] processes, such as how it tries to ‘estimate’ unreported figures, has long been a black box, even to the Bureau of Justice Statistics – the Department of Justice’s actual statistical agency,” says former DOJ Bureau of Justice Statistics Director Jeffrey Anderson.
Alternative data show a sharper increase
Less than half of violent crimes are reported to police departments, which are the source of the FBI’s data. To gauge how much crime goes unreported, the Bureau of Justice Statistics conducts an annual National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS) that interviews 240,000 people about their personal experiences.
This year, the NCVS results showed a 29.1% increase in violent crime. Since the Biden-Harris term began, survey numbers show an overall increase of 55.4% in violent crime, including a 55% rise in aggravated assault, a 63% jump in robberies, and a 42% surge in rapes.
