FBI ‘stealth’ edits 2022 crime statistics, showing crime went up, not down

The FBI quietly made a significant revision to its 2022 crime statistics, revealing violent crime actually climbed 4.5%, rather than declining 2.1% as originally indicated.

The revision was discovered by Real Clear Investigations (RCI) after it noticed a “cryptic reference” on the FBI’s website that data was “updated,” with no further explanation.

“But there is no mention that the numbers increased,” wrote John Lott, president of the Crime Prevention Research Center, for RCI. “One only sees the change by downloading the FBI’s new crime data and comparing it to the file released last year.”

The revision is unprecedented in recent decades, according to Carl Moody, a professor at the College of William & Mary who studies crime.

Moody noted there were no revisions in the FBI’s crime data from 2004 to 2015, and only minor changes of less than one percentage point from 2016 to 2020.

Then, under the Biden administration, substantial changes were made in the 2021 and 2022 data. 

In the absence of any explanation from the FBI, Moody says, the revisions make it difficult to trust the law enforcement agency’s data. 

Other experts agree. 

“It is up to the FBI to explain what they have done, and they haven’t explained these large changes,” Dr. Thomas Marvell, the president of Justec Research, a criminal justice statistical research organization, told RCI. 

Crime, especially murder, remained a top concern for policy makers, researchers and citizens alike as the country entered the post-pandemic era.  

Violent crimes exploded in cities such as Baltimore, Chicago, Los Angeles, New York City, Philadelphia, Seattle and Washington, D.C., up from 5% to 40%, reported Fox News.  

In 2020 murders rose 30%, and then continued to skyrocket in 2021, even as the FBI claimed that nationwide violent crime was down, said Fox.  

The FBI statistics have been repeatedly and misleadingly cited by major media outlets to claim that crime went down under Biden, a notion that has been challenged by the Democrats’ presidential rival, former President Donald Trump. 

During the presidential debate on Sept. 10, ABC News moderator David Muir fact-checked  Trump’s claims that violent crime was still high, noting “FBI says overall violent crime is coming down in this country,” reported The New York Post.  

Trump later ripped Muir for citing the FBI statistics, calling Muir a “fool.”  

Trump said that the statistics from the FBI were unreliable, noting data from the Bureau of Justice Statistics, which showed crime increasing. 

The FBI has recently changed its reporting system, which means that only 70% to 80% of reporting units actually report crime statistics to the federal law enforcement agency.  

That difference in the numbers of places reporting could account for the previously incorrectly reported decline, reports the U.K.’s progressive Guardian. 

However, Moody maintains the FBI is responsible to explain the large revisions, which were made over three weeks ago.   

Moody also highlighted the lack of media coverage correcting the misimpression created by the initial inaccurate FBI data.​ 

“For some reason, the media, they did pick the crime data that they think goes and makes the Democrats look as good as possible,” Lott told Fox News. “And then even when the crime data that they’ve relied on turns out by the very source of that data to be wrong, none of them fix it.”  

U.S. Sen. Pete Ricketts, R-Nebraska, called on the FBI to provide more transparency on how it’s coming up with its numbers.  

“Americans deserve transparency about the safety of our communities. There needs to be accountability for this error,” Ricketts wrote on X. “Crime is rising. We must secure the border and support law enforcement to keep Americans safe.”