The FBI has “updated” its crime data from 2022 to show that far from what the bureau reported in September 2023, violent crime has not decreased during the Biden-Harris administration.
Instead, it increased almost five percent, the news data show. Other data from the National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS) show an increase of almost 30 percent that year.
NCVS data also show that violent crime since the Biden-Harris administration took power has rocketed skyward almost 60 percent.
Which means that former President Donald Trump was right during his debate with Vice President Kamala Harris when he said crime had, indeed, increased. And moderator David Muir was wrong when he “fact-checked” Trump.
Trump nailed Muir in a statement from Mar-a-Lago a month ago.
Trump Versus Muir
Muir asked Trump, who has promised the “largest domestic deportation operation in American history,” whether he would really use local cops to help deport the illegal aliens that President Joe Biden has imported.
In fact, Trump also vowed to use the military, but anyway, Trump delivered a long answer, noting the number of Venezuelan and other “migrant” criminals Biden had imported.
“They’re destroying the fabric of our country by what they’ve done,” Trump said:
There’s never been anything done like this at all. They’ve destroyed the fabric of our country. Millions of people let in. And all over the world crime is down. All over the world except here. Crime here is up and through the roof. Despite their fraudulent statements that they made. Crime in this country is through the roof. And we have a new form of crime. It’s called migrant crime. And it’s happening at levels that nobody thought possible.
Harris gravely shook her head to say, no, and Muir replied this way: “President Trump, as you know, the FBI says overall violent crime is coming down in this country.”
Well, it had said that, but then the bureau recalculated the crime data, which forced it revise its earlier claim that violent crime had decreased.
Lott Report
The Crime Prevention Center’s John Lott drilled into the updated data for RealClearInvestigations.
Though the FBI originally said crime fell 2.1 percent in 2022, in fact, it increased 4.5 percent.
“The FBI has quietly revised those numbers,” Lott reported. The “new data includes thousands more murders, rapes, robberies, and aggravated assaults.”
Yet the bureau “made no mention of these revisions in its September 2024 press release,” Lott continued:
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.
The changes are “extensive,” Lott wrote, with the updated data for 2022 including the following:
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 seismic change in the data calls into question the bureau’s data for 2023 as well.
“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%,” Lott calculated.
But the FBI’s incompetence with the adding machine isn’t the only problem, Lott continued.
The data rely on reported crimes. “Most crimes go unreported, with only about 45% of violent crimes and 30% of property crimes brought to the police’s attention, according to the National Crime Victimization Survey,” Lott wrote.
Another shocking number also shows that crime has not decreased under Biden. Though murders declined 16.2 percent from 2020 to 2023, the rate is still “9.6% higher than pre-COVID levels.”
As for the supposed 3.5-percent decline reported by the FBI for 2023, the NCVS numbers “tell a very different story from the FBI data.”
Based on almost a quarter-million crime-victim interviews, the data show that violent crime increased 4.1 percent. And “even with the revised FBI numbers, in 2022, the FBI’s 4.5% increase pales in comparison to the NCVS’s 29.1% increase.”
Lott also disclosed this shocker when comparing data from the FBI versus data from NCVS.
While the bureau says violent crime dropped 5.8 percent, the NCVS says it increased 55.4 percent:
Rapes are up by 42%, robbery by 63%, and aggravated assault by 55% during Biden’s term. Since the NCVS started, the largest previous increase over three years was 27% in 2006, so the increase under Biden was slightly more than twice as large.
The increases shown by the NCVS during the Biden-Harris administration are by far the largest percentage increases over any three years, slightly more than doubling the previous record.…
At the beginning of this year, the media was running headlines like National Public Radio’s: “Violent crime is dropping fast in the U.S. – even if Americans don’t believe it.” “At some point in 2022 … there was just a tipping point where violence started to fall and it just continued to fall,” NPR claimed. But now the FBI has itself admitted its violent crime numbers were way off.
Trump Response
Last month, Trump reiterated his claim, and cited the NCVS data, noting that Muir was wrong.
“You remember where David Muir tried to correct me when I said that crime is rampant like never before,” Trump said from his golf club in Rancho Palo Verdes, California. “He said, oh no, crime is going down. He said, where are you coming from?”
Calling Muir a “foolish man” and “foolish fool,” Trump said the bureau “defrauded everybody” with bad data.
Trump added that Muir had “good hair, but not as good as it was five years ago.”
