By During the first debate, the biased moderator, David Muir, interrupted Donald Trump with a “fact check” after the former president claimed that crime has risen over the past few years.
Three weeks before an election — and after the debates — FBI revises their crime statistics — showing crime increased by 4.5% in 2022 instead of dropping 2.1%.
Here is ABC’s David Muir “fact checking” Trump in front of millions of viewers with lies that will never be retracted. pic.twitter.com/3N88pjn4g4
— Western Lensman (@WesternLensman) October 16, 2024
It turns out that Muir was wrong and Trump was right.
Since the debate, however, the FBI has quietly updated its 2022 crime statistics, revealing a 4.5 percent increase in violent crime, a sharp contrast to the initial report of a 2.1 percent decline. The revised data includes thousands of additional murders, rapes, robberies, and aggravated assaults, raising concerns about the agency’s transparency and accuracy in reporting crime trends, according to a new investigation by Real Clear Investigations.
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 revised statistics have sparked questions about the reliability of future FBI crime reports. Many researchers are calling for greater transparency in how the FBI compiles its data, especially since the Bureau often estimates figures for jurisdictions that fail to fully report crimes. This practice has led to inconsistencies in the data, prompting experts like Jeffrey Anderson, a former head of the Bureau of Justice Statistics, to argue that the lack of transparency in the FBI’s methodology undermines public trust in the reported crime rates.
While the FBI maintains that violent crime has declined during the Biden administration, other sources, such as the National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS), tell a different story. The NCVS recorded a 4.1 percent rise in violent crime in 2023 and a staggering 29.1 percent increase in 2022—figures that far exceed the FBI’s reported numbers, RCI noted.
The revelation that the FBI appears to have been hiding a rise in crime comes on the heels of the Bureau of Labor statistics being accused of creating unreliable job numbers in an effort to paint a rosy picture about “Bidenomics.”
During the summer, CNN reported that “US job growth during much of the past year was significantly weaker than initially estimated, according to new data….The Bureau of Labor Statistics’ preliminary annual benchmark review of employment data suggests that there were 818,000 fewer jobs in March of this year than were initially reported.
Every year, the BLS conducts a revision to the data from its monthly survey of businesses’ payrolls, then benchmarks the March employment level to those measured by the Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages program.
The preliminary data marks the largest downward revision since 2009 and shows that the labor market wasn’t quite as red hot as initially thought. However, job growth was still historically strong.”
The bureau has been accused of granting “super users” early access to data, which often moves the stock market, before the public. Earlier in the year, wrote The Washington Post, “a Labor Department employee sent out information on housing inflation — one of the most closely watched indicators among market players and economists — to a group addressed as “super users,” including Wall Street analysts.”
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