Government gaslighting: FBI stealthy crime data revisions

During the Sept. 10 debate between presidential candidates Donald Trump and Kamala Harris, ABC News moderator David Muir purported to “fact-check” Trump’s statement that “crime in this country is through the roof,” with the contradiction that “the FBI (Federal Bureau of Investigation) says overall violent crime is coming down in this country.”

Earlier, the Trump/Vance campaign had released a memo to the news media, titled "Joe Biden’s Lies on Crime," which sets out, at length, the problems with relying on the FBI’s crime data. “As you know,” the memo reads, “Joe Biden has recently been claiming that violent crime is down under his administration. In advance of this week’s presidential debate, we felt it necessary to make you aware that the actual facts show conclusively and irrefutably that Joe Biden has presided over a staggering increase in violent crime.”

The memo followed an announcement by the White House that cited FBI data as backing up the claim that violent crime was “dropping at record levels,” and attributing the decline, in part, to President Biden having taken on “the gun lobby” and signing into law “the most significant gun violence legislation in nearly 30 years.” Americans, it stated, were now safer than they were in 2021, with “major reductions in crime in nearly every category — including one of the lowest rates for all violent crime in 50 years.”

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The same talking points appear again in last month’s “Statement from Vice President Harris on Record Declines in Crime,” in which the Democrat presidential candidate emphasizes her work “alongside President Biden” in enacting gun control legislation. “Americans are safer now than when we took office. Last year, we saw the largest ever one-year decrease in the homicide rate, which now stands 16 percent below its 2020 level. Violent crime is at a near 50-year low.”

The Trump memo challenges the FBI’s data as “completely and totally unreliable” because, in 2021, the FBI “drastically changed” how it collects data from local law enforcement agencies, resulting in thousands of local jurisdictions failing to report their crime statistics. (Another source breaks down this “data gap” more specifically, stating that as of the FBI’s reporting deadline in 2023, only 44% of police agencies submitted all 12 months of crime data for 2022; 32% of police agencies submitted no data at all for 2022, and 24% submitted only partial information.)

Even now, as the Trump memo claims, the FBI’s crime statistics for the first quarter of 2024 come “from just 71% of the nation’s law enforcement agencies.” Data from nearly a third of jurisdictions is missing, with ten states and many major cities (including crime hotspots like Chicago, Los Angeles, San Francisco and New York) no longer providing their information. While the FBI has attempted to make up for this shortfall by using estimates, there “is no credible way to ‘estimate’ — or more accurately, forge or fabricate — reliable crime data for a full one third of the United States.”

Alternative data from the Bureau of Justice Statistics’ National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS), which tracks crime using measurements independent of police statistics, shows that contrary to the official narrative, a violent crime wave has occurred under the Biden-Harris administration. Essentially, as the Trump document concludes, “it’s not crime that’s down; it’s crime reporting that’s down.”

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Confirmation that the FBI’s crime reporting is of questionable reliability emerged last week, when RealClearInvestigations (RCI) revealed that the Bureau had made a startling, but covert, revision of its “final” crime data for 2022.

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.”

Viewed in light of the new revisions, though, the 2022 crime data shows a shocking “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.”

This corresponds with the latest (2023) National Crime Victimization Survey findings on violent crime trends published last month. The rate of violent crime victimizations had dropped from 21.0 per 1,000 population in 2019 to 16.4 in 2020, but has exceeded the 2020 rate in every year since: 2021 (16.5), 2022 (23.5) and 2023 (22.5) (these exclude homicides because the NCVS is based on interviews with victims).

RCI concludes that crime under the current administration is indeed setting records — just not the kind that the White House wants to take responsibility for. “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%. ... The increases shown by the NCVS during the Biden-Harris administration are by far the largest percentage increases over any three years, slightly more than doubling the previous record.”

The FBI did not respond to RCI’s “repeated requests for comment,” and as of mid-October there has been no explanation for these changes (parody news site The Babylon Bee offers the possibility that FBI officials may have “been holding the chart upside down for the past several months”). A professor quoted in the RCI article points out that such changes are quite unusual: the FBI had “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.”

Even as the White House spins the “declining crime” line, Americans prefer to trust their own judgment and experience. A majority of those questioned in a 2023 Gallup poll showed crime in their local area had increased over the prior year (and the percentage of those describing their local crime as extremely or very serious hit the highest point ever in 2023). Gun sales between 2020 and 2023 reached record levels, and the latest adjusted National Instant Background Check System (NICS) numbers still place September 2024 as the fifth-highest September in the 25 years of NICS records, starting in 1999. “The trend of 62 months of sales higher than one million per month is unlikely to be broken soon.”

Responding to the news of the FBI’s revisions, a spokesperson for Trump commented that Trump had been right all along. “Violent crime is up and if Kamala is given another four years to implement her weak-on-crime, defund the police, no cash bail policies” — in addition to her explicit hostility to responsible gun owners and the Second Amendment — “America will continue to turn into a crime-ridden hellhole.”

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