Here’s the question for the FBI after learning that crime statistics are UP, not down – was this intentional, or yet another example of incompetence?

“Both” might well be the answer, but we shouldn’t have to automatically assume both in a miss of this magnitude. It has now been revealed that the FBI has engaged in a “stealth edit” of crime statistics for 2022. Those “final” figures were released over a year ago. Well, it turns out that the figures weren’t quite so “final” after all.

Guess what? Crime isn't down 2.1%, according to the FBI. They just released a "stealth-edit" update: violent crime is actually up 4.5%.https://t.co/hLRWthHKC0

— Tom Bevan (@TomBevanRCP) October 16, 2024

When the FBI originally released the “final” crime data for 2022 in September 2023, it reported that 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.

But the FBI has quietly revised those numbers, releasing new data that shows violent crime increased in 2022 by 4.5%. The new data includes thousands more murders, rapes, robberies, and aggravated assaults.

The Bureau – which has been at the center of partisan storms – made no mention of these revisions in its September 2024 press release.

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.

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 actual changes in crimes are extensive. The updated data for 2022 report that there were 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. The question naturally arises: should the FBI’s 2023 numbers be believed?

These are NOT small numbers.

There it is: FBI "revised" violent crime data, now reporting that instead of a 2.1% drop in violent crime in 2022, it was actually a 4.5% increase. https://t.co/Bvbg0wKy1A pic.twitter.com/h6nfjRRlUb

— zerohedge (@zerohedge) October 16, 2024

And yes, the media absolutely promoted the heck out of the news that crime statistics had dropped in 2023. In light of this, how can anyone have confidence in those numbers?

So, either the FBI deliberately cooked the stats so that they would look good – and be a talking point that could be used in presidential debates – or they are so freaking incompetent that we should just accept that every stat and figure coming from the DOJ is wrong. And yes, this data was absolutely used against Republicans who were trying to point out that violent crime was up. Remember the disgraceful ABC moderators during the Trump-Harris presidential debate? David Muir parroted these numbers as a “fact check.”

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

At the time, the Trump campaign – and groups who actually study crime trends – had pointed out that crimes were going underreported because of a widespread belief that law enforcement would not do anything to help, and that large cities were no longer reporting crime data to the FBI, which almost certainly is skewing the numbers, as was pointed out when the DOJ bragged about the numbers last June.

“This data makes clear that last year’s historic decline in violent crime is continuing,” said Department of Justice Attorney General Merrick B Garland, in a statement released on Monday. “Our work will not be done until all Americans feel safe in their communities.”

However, data informing the FBI’s figures is supplied voluntarily by law enforcement agencies across the US, and do not include major metropolitan areas including Los Angeles and New York, where crime is historically high. The LAPD and NYPD are the two largest police forces in the nation, but they are not included in the FBI data, which could have changed the data if it had been included.

The FBI data for 2024 has yet to be released beyond a short press announcement abou the total. The data has not been publicly released for specific regions or states in the country. The last publicly available figures are from 2022.

In 2022, about two-thirds of the nation’s 6,000 police agencies report their data to the FBI.

The issue stems from a change in how the FBI asked agencies to submit data in 2021. Many police departments had outdated technology that couldn’t be changed in time, leading to them falling out of the FBI data, according to the Marshall Project.

That has impacted the data received by the FBI as some of the nations largest agencies, which also includes Phoneix police and the Hillsborough County Sheriff’s Office in Florida, not being part of the system.

Those agencies typically high numbers of arrests and incidents and when left off can change the percentages nationwide for crime across the US.

Knowing that, there is absolutely no way that the FBI numbers can be accurate – and yet the DOJ puts out what they have in order to make things look good, the media in large part dutifully report it, and Democrats run to use the numbers in order to prove that the current administration isn’t a TOTAL disaster.

Crime is lower today than under Trump.

Border crossings are lower today than under Trump. https://t.co/0uXSuD0pKk

— Chris Murphy 🟧 (@ChrisMurphyCT) October 8, 2024

There will be no apologies or retractions or corrections. The “stealth edit,” unacknowledged and embarassing, will be all we get. Politicians may still trot out the lie that crime is down, and it will only be those who are aware that the numbers were changed on the sly who will dare to correct them. And when the correction comes, Republicans will be blamed for “pouncing” on the changed numbers. The sin isn’t that the FBI presented incomplete data, hyped it up as a decrease in crime, and then went back to quietly increase the numbers much later. The sin will be upon our heads for even noticing that it happened, and making the lie of omission into a lie of commission – because it is apparently too much to ask the FBI not to lie to us in the first place.

Featured image via Federal Bureau of Investigation on Flickr, cropped, public domain