The FBI recently updated its 2022 violent crime stats, addressing what turned out to be a massive underreporting problem. Prior to this, former President Donald Trump had been fact-checked live during his debate against Vice President Kamala Harris for saying that violent crime was on the rise. He was ridiculed afterward and accused of either getting his information mixed up or flat-out lying. But now it seems Trump was right all along, so the progressive media must be falling all over itself to correct the record in the name of journalistic integrity and accurate reporting – or, at the very least, to wipe the egg off the industry’s face – right?
Not quite.
The FBI Was Silent – And So Was the Anti-Trump Media
First and foremost, credit must be given where it’s due. John R. Lott Jr., of RealClearInvestigations, was the first to discover and break the news. As he explained, the FBI originally released its “final” crime data for 2022 in September of 2023. At the time, it was reported that the overall violent crime rate had fallen by 2.1%. The Bureau dropped numbers in an October 16, 2023, press release, extolling a 6.1% drop in murders and a 5.4% drop in rapes compared to the previous year – remember this announcement, as it will become relevant soon enough. The Democratic Party and the left-wing media quickly seized it as a talking point. And why shouldn’t they? If true, it certainly makes it seem like the Biden-Harris administration had been cleaning up the streets, so to speak.
“Shockingly, the FBI’s September press release with the 2023 data doesn’t mention the changes to earlier data and that the original drop in violent crime for 2022 was now an increase. Nor did they mention that the new reported increase in 2022 was larger than the claimed decrease in 2023.” – CrimeResearch.org
Cue the government revisions. As economic guru Andrew Moran has frequently reported for Liberty Nation News, the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) has been reporting impressive jobs numbers month over month, making the Biden administration look far more effective than the previous one – only to then quietly revise those numbers downward shortly after, revealing that, in fact, we are not enjoying a miraculous economic recovery after all. So perhaps it should come as no surprise to see the FBI significantly adjust its violent crime report upward.
The update shows that there were actually 80,029 more violent crimes reported to the FBI in 2022 than in 2021. This includes an increase of 1,699 murders, 7,780 rapes, 33,459 robberies, and 37,091 aggravated assaults. So, rather than decreasing by 2.1% in 2022, violent crime increased by 4.5% – a total discrepancy of 6.6%! Now, remember that detailed announcement in 2023? Here’s how the Bureau let everyone know that it had fixed an error in the most recent press release: “The 2022 violent crime rate has been updated for inclusion in CIUS, 2023.” After numbers like that … nothing?
Indeed, even the media continued the lie. As Lott explained in his report, a USA Today headline – published after the update – read: “Violent crime dropped for third straight year in 2023, including murder and rape.” CNN also ran a deceptive story that completely ignored this change. “New FBI statistics show continued drop in US crime in first six months of 2024,” read the September 30 headline. “Crime in the United States dropped throughout the first six months of 2024, according to preliminary figures released Monday by the FBI, continuing a trend in falling crime rates the bureau recently noted for 2023,” the introductory line reads. The self-declared “most trusted name in news” then went on to detail the drop in 2023 numbers over the previous year, but didn’t once mention 2022 directly or the amended stats at all. As Lott put it at the time his article was published, “It’s been over three weeks since the FBI released the revised data. The Bureau’s lack of acknowledgement or explanation about the significant change concerns researchers.” (Read more: Liberty Nation News, 10/18/2024) (Archive)