FBI's Revised Crime Data Shows Crime Surge, Not a Decline, as Democrats Claim

White House Archive

Last year, the Federal Bureau of Investigation issued a "final" nationwide crime data for 2022.

The FBI claimed that violent crime in the United States had decreased by 2.1 percent. 

Democrats immediately used this data to refute Donald Trump's claim that violent crime was up under the Biden-Harris administration.

Yet now, a year later, the FBI has apparently revised its data. According to a RealClearInvestigations report by John Lott, the new numbers now show that violent crime actually increased in 2022 by 4.5 percent.

In other words, the FBI was off in its last report - by a whopping 6.6 percent.

According to Lott, these data additions point to more incidents of murder, sexual and other aggravated assaults that were previously ignored.

In other words, Trump was right about crime going up under Biden-Harris.

This change was not mentioned in an FBI September press release. But Lott, who was a senior adviser for research and statistics in the Office of Justice Programs and the Office of Legal Policy at the U.S. Justice Department, says that he found the agency's correction through "a cryptic reference" on the FBI website.

That "reference" said, "The 2022 violent crime rate has been updated for inclusion in CIUS, 2023."

It was a vague sentence and did not state that the violent crime numbers had increased. Lott compared the updated data with the initial filing from 2023.

According to Lott, there were 80,029 more violent crimes in 2022 than in 2021.

How did the FBI miss so many crimes in the first report?

Lott asks, "The question naturally arises: should the FBI's 2023 numbers be believed?"

He added, "The Bureau's lack of acknowledgment or explanation about the significant change concerns researchers."

Indeed. How did the FBI get the initial report so wrong? Was it a coincidence that it came out as we were entering a presidential election?

And perhaps most importantly, what can we do to bring violent crime down?

Kamala Harris might claim to have the answer. But the data now suggests otherwise.