The FBI’s latest data shows police reports of violent crime rose from 2021 to 2022, contradicting the bureau’s previous assertions and undercutting the narrative President Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris have offered that public safety was improving.
FBI analysts had originally reported a 1.7% drop in violent crime between the two years. But the revised data, quietly released last month, shows a 4.5% increase, according to John R. Lott Jr., president of the Crime Prevention Research Center.
The FBI says it stands by its original calculation about a crime drop, but acknowledges the numbers are changing because of how the bureau now collects and publishes the crime reports.
Mr. Lott said the bureau’s own numbers disprove its conclusions.
“It’s not like this is rocket science,” he said. “The point is it changed, and I don’t know why they want to go and say even now that it fell.”
His research quickly spread through conservative corners of social media, spawning new accusations about the FBI interfering in the 2024 election, where crime trends are a major issue.
The data comes from crime reports that the FBI compiles from police agencies across the country.
Last October, the bureau released its 2022 data. According to Mr. Lott, the FBI originally showed 1,253,716 reports of violent crime in 2021, dropping to 1,232,428 reports in 2022.
But the revised numbers show 1,197,930 reports of violent crime in 2021 and 1,256,671 in 2022, for an increase of 58,741.
That included 1,074 fewer murders and non-negligent homicides recorded in 2021 than the FBI initially said. And it included 625 more of them in 2022.
The FBI’s revised data also reverses its findings on aggravated assaults and robberies, showing significant increases from 2021 to 2022.
Mr. Lott said the change in murders was particularly striking, since that’s the one crime category that’s been thought to be fairly accurate. Dead bodies usually get reported.
The FBI, in a statement to The Washington Times, said it remains confident in its original estimates.
As for the revised numbers, the bureau said it adopted a more comprehensive crime reporting scheme in 2021, but a “significant number” of local police agencies were unable to deliver their data in the new format. The FBI made estimates to come up with comparisons, and used those to conclude that crime dipped under Mr. Biden from 2021 to 2022.
When the FBI released the 2023 data last month, though, it went back and replaced the extrapolated data with raw counts coming in from police departments.
“Therefore, 2021 counts now showing in the 20-year estimation tables reflect only estimates based on the data directly reported to the FBI. This explains why the figure appears different than the computed estimation published in the Crime in the Nation, 2022,” the bureau said.
That’s reflected in the FBI’s Crime Data Explorer, the online tool that shows the numbers.
It says the 2021 data is based on reports covering 76.9% of the U.S. population, while the 2022 data covers 92.8% of the population. The 2023 data, the most recent year, covers 92.5% of the population. The FBI has said crime dropped from 2022 to 2023.
Sean Kennedy, executive director at the Coalition for Law, Order and Safety, said the FBI needs to be more honest about limitations in its crime data.
“The FBI is overconfident in the accuracy of their data and is misrepresenting it to third parties, including the media, that its data is infallible when in fact it’s deeply flawed,” Mr. Kennedy said. “They know it and they even disclose that but they don’t put those asterisks, those caveats in their press releases.”
“The media has then gone on to report the FBI data as gospel when it is in fact a rough translation of the real crime picture in America,” Mr. Kennedy said.
That played out in real time during the debate between Ms. Harris and former President Donald Trump, who said crime had surged on the Biden administration’s watch.
ABC News moderator David Muir stepped in to try to correct Mr. Trump, citing FBI statistics as evidence crime was dropping.
In fact, the FBI data does not reflect actual crimes, but rather crime reports compiled by local authorities. Those reports may correlate to actual crime rates, but that is not a given.
Mr. Kennedy said there are also known issues with what local departments report to the FBI.
New Orleans, for one, acknowledged earlier this year that it undercounted rape by more than 400 cases in 2021 and 2022. And St. Louis said it sent bad data to the FBI that undercounted its crimes by as much as 15% in 2021.
Mr. Lott said he’s asked the FBI how they do their estimates for agencies that don’t provide data or supply only partial data. He said the bureau has rebuffed those inquiries, which reinforces his skepticism over how the FBI is handling the revised data now.
“If they’re unwilling to be clean about this it should raise questions of trust about the data,” he said. “Let’s just assume it was incompetence or mistakes. They own up to it and say we’ve revised the data and don’t make it a black box about how you estimate these data that are there.”
Another branch of the Justice Department, the Bureau of Justice Statistics, does an annual survey of more than 200,000 Americans to gather data on who was victimized by criminals. The BJS’s data indicates crime was virtually unchanged from 2022 to 2023, and is substantially higher than it was in 2020, the last year under Mr. Trump.
The victimization data and the FBI crime report data came out within two weeks of each other last month. The FBI data drew extensive attention, while the victimization data drew far less coverage.
Mr. Lott crunched the BJS numbers and calculated that violent crime jumped 37% under Mr. Biden, compared to a 17% drop while Mr. Trump was in office.
Usually the FBI crime reporting data and BJS’s victimization data rise and fall in tandem, so the dissonance right now is surprising.
Mr. Lott, though, says there are good reasons why the victimization survey may be capturing what’s going on. He said some Americans may have figured that there’s no reason to report crimes anymore, given dropping closure rates for police investigations and a sense that some prosecutors are reluctant to bring charges against some perpetrators or for some crimes because of ideological reasons.
• Stephen Dinan can be reached at sdinan@washingtontimes.com.
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