The Biden administration's FBI reportedly altered its 2022 crime statistics to show an increase in violent crime after initially claiming a decrease.
RealClear Investigations (RCI) reported Wednesday that the FBI "has quietly" revised 2022 crime data to show violent crime increased by 4.5%, which includes thousands more murders, rapes, robberies, and aggravated assaults.
The updated data for 2022 report that there were 80,029 more violent crimes than in 2021.
"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," University of Georgia professor David Mustard, who researches extensively on crime, told RCI.
"This lack of transparency harms the FBI's credibility."
When it released the "final" crime data for 2022 in September 2023, the FBI reported violent crime rate fell by 2.1%.
Based on the updated 2022 data, the drop in violent crime in 2023 is only 1.6% instead of the reported drop of 3.5%, RCI said.
Interestingly, the Justice Department's Bureau of Justice Statistics 2023 National Crime Victimization Survey, based on interviews with 240,000 people each year about their personal experiences, found a 4.1% increase in the reported 2023 violent crime rate.
Democrats campaigning for office have used the FBI's original 2022 crime data to counter former President Donald Trump's claims of rising crime.
The FBI made no mention of the data revisions in its September 2024 press release. 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."
There's no mention that the numbers increased.
RCI said a person only notices the change by downloading the FBI's new crime data and comparing it to the file released last year.
"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 RCI. "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."
Dr. Thomas Marvell, the president of Justec Research, called on the FBI to explain the update.
"It is up to the FBI to explain what they have done, and they haven't explained these large changes," Marvell told RCI.
The Trump campaign issued a release titled "President Trump Is Right…Again" about the RCI finding. RCI added that the FBI joined the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) in changing numbers. The BLS massively overestimated the number of jobs created during the year that ended in March by 818,000 people.