OAN Staff Brooke Mallory
12:14 PM – Wednesday, October 16, 2024
A new report has highlighted how the FBI under the Biden administration changed its 2022 crime figures to reflect a rise in violent crime after initially claiming that crime had decreased.
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The FBI “quietly” updated 2022 crime statistics to reflect a 4.5% rise in violent crime, including hundreds more homicides, rapes, robberies, and aggravated assaults, according to a study released on Wednesday by RealClear Investigations (RCI).
The most recent figures for 2022 now admit that violent crimes increased by 80,029, compared to 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.”
The FBI previously claimed that there was a 2.1% decrease in violent crime when it issued the “final” crime data for 2022 in September 2023.
According to RCI, they had also projected a 3.5% decline in violent crime in 2023, meaning it was actually only 1.6% based on the updated 2022 data.
The reported 2023 violent crime rate increased by 4.1%, according to the Justice Department’s Bureau of Justice Statistics 2023 National Crime Victimization Survey, which is based on interviews with 240,000 people annually regarding their individual experiences.
Democrats running for office have refuted former President Donald Trump’s assertions of increased crime by using the FBI’s initial 2022 crime statistics., which have now been shown to be inaccurate.
The data modifications were not included in the FBI’s news statement from September 2024. The modification was made known to RCI by a mysterious link on the FBI website that reads “The 2022 violent crime rate has been updated for inclusion in CIUS, 2023.”
The fact that the numbers rose is not even mentioned. According to RCI, the only way to detect the alteration is to download the FBI’s most recent crime statistics and compare it with the information that was made public last year.
“I have checked the data on total violent crime from 2004 to 2022,” said Carl Moody, a professor at the College of William & Mary who specializes in studying crime. “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.”
In addition, Dr. Thomas Marvell, the president of Justec Research in Williamsburg, VA, urged the FBI to further explain the revision.
“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 also chimed in and highlighted the sly revision.
“A new report reveals the FBI secretly updated its crime data to show that violent crime didn’t drop by 2.1% in 2022, but instead increased in 2022 by 4.5%. Democrats continue to lie when they claim that crime is under control under Kamala Harris. She would make things even worse with her defund the police agenda. When the FBI originally released the “final” crime data for 2022 in September 2023, it reported that the nation’s violent crime rate fell by 2.1%. This quickly became, and remains, a Democratic Party talking point to counter Donald Trump’s claims of soaring crime,” stated the Trump-Vance campaign.
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