So it turns out that former President Donald Trump was right when he said that crime is up significantly under the Joe Biden-Kamala Harris administration. Recently revised FBI data proves it so.
During the Sept. 10 presidential debate, Trump said, “Crime is down all over the world, except here. Crime here is up and through the roof, despite their fraudulent statements that they made.”
He added, “And we have a new form of crime. It’s called migrant crime, and it’s happening at levels that nobody thought possible.”
Vice President Kamala Harris was shaking her head “No” throughout Trump’s answer.
Do you trust the FBI?
Yes: 0% (0 Votes)
No: 100% (5 Votes)
ABC News moderator David Muir then gave her an assist saying, “President Trump, as you know, the FBI says overall violent crime is actually coming down in this country.”
Trump responded, “Excuse me the FBI defrauded. They were defrauding statements. They didn’t include the worst cities.”
Fact check, true. More on those major omissions in a moment.
But first, John Lott — president of the Crime Prevention Research Center and former Justice Department senior adviser for research and statistics — in a Wednesday piece for Real Clear Investigations documented how the FBI’s recently released revised data for 2022 showed violent crime increased by 4.5 percent over the previous year.
NEW: FBI updates crime statistics showing that violent crime *increased* not decreased.
Trump was fact-checked during the debate after he (correctly) asserted that crime had increased.
New data reveals violent crime increased in 2022 by 4.5%, not decreased like the left… pic.twitter.com/ky4Y2pPf6j
— Collin Rugg (@CollinRugg) October 16, 2024
There were in fact 80,029 more violent crimes compared to 2021, including 1,699 more murders, 7,780 more rapes, 33,459 more robberies and 37,091 more aggravated assaults.
Lott noted, “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.”
NEW—Just like it’s had to repeatedly revise economic figures to remove hundreds of thousands of nonexistent jobs, the Biden admin is now quietly revising crime data to add tens of thousands of missing crimes.
Turns out your eyes (and Trump) were correct and the media was wrong:… pic.twitter.com/doco9U2RGO
— Charlie Kirk (@charliekirk11) October 16, 2024
Carl Moody, a professor at the College of William & Mary who specializes in studying crime, told Real Clear Investigations that he had checked the crime data from 2004 to 2022 and found no such drastic changes.
“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.”
David Mustard, a professor at the University of Georgia who researches extensively on crime, told RCI, “This FBI report is stunning because it now doesn’t state that violent crime in 2022 was much higher than it had previously reported, nor does it explain why the new rate is so much higher, and it issued no press release about this large revision.”
It seems highly likely, given this administration’s record, that the crime statistics for 2023 will be revised up too at some point after the election, of course.
Muir, when he fact-checked Trump, was likely referring to the FBI’s 2024 quarterly report that does show violent crime decreased by 15.2 percent when compared to the first three months of 2023, but even that was deceiving, the New York Post reported.
“The FBI statistics included murder, rape, robbery and aggravated assault under violent crimes — but was far from a complete picture, as only 72% of the law enforcement population participated in the report,” the Post added.
As reported by The Western Journal in May, the Coalition for Law and Order released a study highlighting that the FBI estimated crime data for large cities like New York, Los Angeles, Phoenix and Pittsburgh, because they did not participate in its survey.
Former assistant FBI director and current CLOS President Mark Morgan and Executive Director of CLOS Sean Kennedy, who together authored the study, argued in a story for the Washington Examiner that the FBI’s data is “unreliable at best and deceptive at worst” because of the reporting issues.
“To adjust for the absence of NIBRS [National Incident-Based Reporting System] data, the FBI uses estimates to calculate the total number of offenses that would likely have been reported to law enforcement in aggregate,” the CLOS study said. “So, there’s a level of uncertainty in the accuracy of the FBI’s data.”
To gain a fuller picture, the CLOS report included statistics provided by the FBI, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Council on Criminal Justice for 32 large cities.
Comparing 2019 to 2023, homicides are up 8.3 percent by the FBI’s numbers, up 19.9 percent per the CDC, and up 18 percent based on the CCJ stats.
Aggravated assault is down 3 percent since 2019, according to FBI statistics, but up 8 percent in the CCJ survey.
Townhall’s Mia Cathell elaborated on the findings writing, “CLOS identified four factors that have helped cause an increase in crime across most major U.S. cities as a lack of faith in law enforcement persists: de-policing (i.e. defunding the police), de-carceration, de-prosecution, and politicization of the criminal justice system (via politically motivated prosecutors regularly downgrading felonies to misdemeanors or opting not to prosecute).”
So once again, Trump is right. Crime remains a major problem in this country due to leftist policies, and it is being underreported by the Biden-Harris administration.
Advertise with The Western Journal and reach millions of highly engaged readers, while supporting our work. Advertise Today.
