With less than two months before the 2024 election the FBI quietly stealth edits their violent crime statistics for 2022 to show a substantial increase in violent crime as opposed to the decrease it showed before – which Democrats have been enthusiastically citing every chance they get.
Real Clear Investigations reporter John R. Lott Jr. said the undisclosed changes in crime statistics show violent crime increased 4.5% in 2022. The FBI’s statistics previously showed a 2.1% drop in violent crime.
Lott said this stealth change, made without any explanation, makes it tough to trust the FBI’s crime statistics.
Here’s more from RCI:
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.
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?
Without the increase, the drop in violent crime in 2023 would have been less than half as large – only 1.6% instead of the reported drop of 3.5%.
A half-century ago, the DOJ provided a total crime measure, including both reported and unreported crime. The results of the department’s Bureau of Justice Statistics 2023 National Crime Victimization Survey, released in mid-September, tell a very different story from the FBI data.
The NCVS interviews 240,000 people each year about their personal experiences.
Instead of the FBI’s 3.5% drop in the reported violent crime rate in 2023, the NCVS found a 4.1% increase in the reported violent crime rate. Even with the revised FBI numbers, in 2022, the FBI’s 4.5% increase pales in comparison to the NCVS’s 29.1% increase.
Waiting until right before the 2024 election to make this years-late change to the data sure makes it look like the FBI is as partisan as ever. I’m not sure I’d believe the FBI’s explanation if they offered one but they didn’t even disclose the change, much less try to explain it. So we are left to our own suspicions and mine say this is the FBI playing with the numbers to help Democrats win elections. Biden’s DOJ and FBI have been awfully corrupt over the years and there’s no way I’m giving them the benefit of the doubt on this one. They lost the American people’s trust a long time ago and they’ll have to work hard to earn it back.
Lott has a lot more to say about this in his full article so be sure and check it out.
