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In May, Broad + Liberty reported that FBI “final” crime data reported in September 2023, noting a drop in the nation’s violent crime rate by 2.1 percent was plagued with validity questions. Regardless, this report was used to fuel Democratic Party talking points to counter Republican claims that crime was “out of control”. A month later, a similar Broad + Liberty report was published questioning the validity of federally reported job numbers used by the Biden/Harris administration to tout “record job growth”, was later revised to show a loss of over 818,000 jobs.
A recent report by Real Clear Investigations showed the FBI had quietly revised their 2023 crime numbers, proving Broad + Liberty’s reporting was correct, with data that showing an increase in violent crimes like murders, rapes, robberies, and aggravated assaults by 4.5 percent in 2022.
What’s more suspicious, considering the FBI and their parent organization, the Department of Justice’s recent partisan scandals, issued no statements regarding their revisions in its September 2024 press release. It was in a regular review of this release by former DOJ official John R. Lott Jr., President of the Crime Prevention Research Center, who saw a cryptic reference on the FBI website stating: “The 2022 violent crime rate has been updated for inclusion in CIUS, 2023” without mention that their crime numbers increased.
This important statistical revision can only be discovered by downloading the FBI’s new crime data and comparing it to the file released last year. This presents ethical and political questions for the Biden/Harris administration as a slew of talking points were pushed to the media, reading: “Violent crime dropped for third straight year in 2023, including murder and rape.” Earlier this year, headlines like National Public Radio’s: “Violent crime is dropping fast in the U.S. – even if Americans don’t believe it” were being run. But now, the FBI has itself has quietly admitted its violent crime numbers were way off.
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.
“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?
Without the increase, the drop in violent crime in 2023 would have been less than half as large – only 1.6 percent instead of the reported drop of 3.5 percent.
“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 Real Clear Investigations. “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.”
The FBI’s crime stats revisions reveal how much guesswork is involved in even the “final” numbers often seized on by politicians. The FBI doesn’t simply count reported crimes. Instead, it offers estimates by extrapolating data from police departments that report only partial-year data.
Another problem with the mainstream media’s reliance on FBI crime data is that this is the first administration where their Uniform Crime Report is in conflict with the National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS), which is run by the DOJ’s Bureau of Justice Statistics. The survey was created in the 1970s to give the DOJ a total crime measure, to include both reported and unreported crime. The results of the 2023 National Crime Victimization Survey, told a very different story from the FBI data, which prompted Broad + Liberty’s original reporting.
The 2023 NCVS interviews of 240,000 people found a 4.1 percent increase in the reported violent crime rate in contrast with the FBI’s 3.5 percent drop. Even with the revised FBI numbers, in 2022, the FBI’s 4.5 percent increase pales in comparison to the NCVS’s 29.1 percent increase that year. Since the NCVS started, the largest previous increase over three years was 27 percent in 2006, so the increase under the Biden/Harris administration was slightly more than twice as large.
Drilling down into the individual crime categories was even more damning to the validity of FBI statistics. Traditionally, the NCVS and FBI reports of murder and motor vehicle theft are essentially the same, as both crimes tend to be reported to law enforcement. However, the FBI revisions gleaned an underreporting of 1,699 murders and 54,216 motor vehicle thefts in 2022, casting doubt on the reliability of the data. Although recent attention has focused on the decline in murder rates, even with the revised numbers, the 16.2 percent drop from 2020 to 2023 still leaves murder rates 9.6 percent higher than pre-Covid levels.
While the FBI claims that serious violent crime has fallen by 5.8 percent since the Biden/Harris administration took office, NCVS numbers show that total violent crime has risen by 55.4 percent, which include severe crimes like rape, which is up by 42 percent, robbery by 63 percent, and aggravated assault by 55 percent in the last three years. 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.
Comparing 2023 rates with 2019 pre-Covid violent crime rates, the FBI’s new 2023 data show virtually no improvement – just a 0.2 percent drop – while the NCVS shows a 19 percent increase over that period. But the news media didn’t cover the crime survey when it was released last month.
Throughout this election year, polls show that Americans are concerned about crime. A Gallup survey late last year found that 92 percent of Republicans and 58 percent of Democrats thought crime was increasing. A February Rasmussen Reports survey found that, by a 4.7-to-1 margin, likely voters say violent crime in the U.S. is getting worse (61 percent), not better (13 percent). A Gallup poll found in March that “crime and violence” was Americans’ second biggest concern, after inflation.
Meanwhile, the Biden/Harris administration, seemingly in sync with their re-election campaigns, peddled inaccurate FBI crime data to gaslight Americans into believing they were wrong about the safety of their communities. When trust in the FBI erodes, a dangerous precedent is set, and it’s vital that the next President appoint a new, apolitical Attorney General and FBI Director who restores trust in our criminal justice system.
Based in Philadelphia, A. Benjamin Mannes is a consultant and subject matter expert in security & criminal justice reform based on his own experiences on both sides of the criminal justice system. He has served as a federal and municipal law enforcement officer and was the former Director, Office of Investigations with the American Board of Internal Medicine. @PublicSafetySME
