The Biden Justice Department, much like the Biden Labor Department, is quietly amending its crime statistics after posting incomplete data to dispute a key charge that former President Donald Trump has made against Joe Biden.
For most of his third campaign for office, President Trump has regularly railed against rising violent crime in the U.S., tying high-profile instances of murder to the millions of new migrants who crossed into the country over the past two years. In response, both Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris have disputed his characterization of crime, and they have been assisted by a mainstream media that has all too often rebutted Trump’s assertions, claiming violent crime is down year-over-year. That turned out to be false, according to the FBI.
RealClearPolitics first noted a “stealth edit” made by Bureau officials in their crime data from 2022 through September 2023 where initial data showed violent crime falling by 2.1% during that period. On Wednesday, RCP reported that the FBI report now shows violent crime rose by 4.5% in that time span, vindicating President Trump and the families of murder victims who say a secure southern border may have saved their loved ones from tragic ends. In a press release last month, the FBI public relations team made no mention of the drastic change.
Even if one knew where to look, the new numbers don’t immediately pop out. Reporter John R. Lott Jr. wrote that he first noticed a cryptic line in an FBI update to the website which stated, “The 2022 violent crime rate has been updated for inclusion in CIUS, 2023.” The only way to see the change, he wrote, was to download the current data and compare it to the previously posted data which has since been removed.
During last month’s debate, President Trump assured viewers that “crime is up” across the country, prompting Vice President Harris to frown and shake her head. “Despite their fraudulent statements they made, crime in this country is through the roof. And we have a new form of crime, it’s called migrant crime,” Trump said on September 10th, “and it’s happening at levels nobody thought possible.” Some of the examples cited by Trump and others include the killing of Georgia college student Laken Riley and the rape and murder of a 12-year-old Texas girl, both allegedly at the hands of recent migrants. Debate moderator David Muir did Harris’ bidding and immediately fact-checked Trump on the crime rate.
Watch:
Trump was right https://t.co/87neGuNLqL pic.twitter.com/t7btwZF8uk
— ALX 🇺🇸 (@alx) October 16, 2024
It’s doubtful whether media outlets that dutifully covered the “drop” in violent crime will now acknowledge that rates have gone up. Shortly after the FBI released last year’s data, a headline in USA Today screamed, “Violent crime dropped for third straight year in 2023, including murder and rape.” Carl Moody, a professor at the College of William & Mary who specializes in studying crime, said the sudden and silent change made FBI figures “hard to trust” for him going forward. “The huge changes in 2021 and 2022, especially without an explanation, make it difficult to trust the FBI data,” he told RCP. “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, added.
Digging into the data, the FBI now reports there were over 80,000 more violent crimes in 2022 compared to the prior year. Among them were 1,699 murders, 7,780 rapes, 33,459 robberies, and 37,091 aggravated assaults. And their revision is not the only major Biden agency to be doing so: every month for the past year, the U.S. Bureau of Labor has revised downward the number of jobs created, more than 818,000 in total.
