The FBI quietly revised the U.S. crime statistics to show an increase in violent crime.
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.
The more than 6 percentage point change is unprecedented in recent FBI statistic reporting, William & Mary professor Carl Moody told the outlet.
“I have checked the data on total violent crime from 2004 to 2022,” he said. “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.”
The only announcement of the change was a single footnote in the 2023 crime statistic report, where the agency acknowledged, “The 2022 violent crime rate has been updated for inclusion in CIUS, 2023.”
“It is up to the FBI to explain what they have done, and they haven’t explained these large changes,” Justec Research President Thomas Marvell added.
The FBI’s September press release doesn’t note the change in crime statistics.
According to crimeresearch.org, the revised FBI statistics show a net increase of 1,699 more murders, 7,780 more rapes, 33,459 more robberies, and 37,091 more aggravated assaults from 2021 to 2022. Some figures from 2021 were decreased.
The increase was recorded despite the fact that data still weren’t collected from some of the most violent precincts.
After the FBI changed the way it collects national crime data in 2021, some major police departments, such as those in New York City and Los Angeles, haven’t turned over their crime data.
The FBI discloses now that its data are “based on data received from 13,719 of 19,268 law enforcement agencies in the country.”
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The update is politically charged, as Democrats have liberally cited the previous numbers showing a decrease in crime as evidence that former President Donald Trump’s and Republicans’ concern over rising crime is false.
During the September presidential debate, Trump sparred with the moderator after the latter pointed to FBI statistics to show that violent crime had decreased for several years in a row, something the new statistics found to be definitively false.