The FBI’s Crimes Against Truth

"Open up! This is the FBI, with some false numbers for you!"

Photo by David Trinks on Unsplash

The latest national crime report from the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) shows that the agency somehow got it radically wrong when it claimed that the nation’s crime rate fell by 2.1 percent in 2022.

In reality (where I prefer to live), violent crime increased by 4.5 percent in 2022, the FBI now reports in what John Lott of the Crime Prevention Research Center describes as a “quiet” revision of those numbers, which the FBI had announced were “final” in September of last year.

That is a 6.6 percentage point miss by the FBI in its original estimate.

By the strangest coincidence, the Biden administration and the press have been trumpeting the reported decrease in violent crime as Donald Trump and other political opponents were citing a surge in murders, rapes, robberies, and aggravated assaults in the United States and the public was expressing heightened concerns about crime.

It turns out that the public and the Republicans were right and the experts at the FBI were wrong. Or at least what the experts at the FBI told the public was wrong.

The FBI is still trying to keep quiet about the rise in crime, Lott notes:

The Bureau—which has been at the center of partisan storms—made no mention of these revisions in its September 2024 press release. 

[RealClearInvestigations] 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.

The data indicate that this degree of inaccuracy in a “final” report of crime rates is rare, Lott notes:

“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 RealClearInvestigations. “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 real numbers for 2022 are tragic. Lott writes,

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 FBI’s numbers, moreover, document only reported crimes. The reported percentage of crimes in many categories differs greatly from their real incidence, as I’ve noted before (LLP #64, for example). There are statistics that give a better idea of the full amount of crime, Lott notes:

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.

Those numbers are dismaying. For a government bureau to hide the truth from the public is disgraceful. Unfortunately, it has become commonplace.

Among the public, fraud is punished as a crime. Former president Donald Trump was convicted in (corrupt) New York for false estimates of the value of his properties. When the federal government does the same thing, it is brushed off later as a “correction,” and the truth is buried in a subsequent report as an “update.”

Governments should be held to at least as high a standard as the public.