In a quiet move, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) amended its report on crime statistics for 2022, a year primarily under the governance of the Biden/Harris administration, to demonstrate an actual surge in violent crime by 4.5 percent. Prior to this amendment, the official narrative suggested a decline in crime rates.
On June 11, 2024, President Biden extolled his and Vice President Harris’s crime policies, contended erroneously that they had helped bring about a substantial reduction in crime. ‘In the year before my tenure as President, we faced a record-breaking spike in the murder rate. Yet, the past year witnessed the sharpest fall of homicide incidents in history’, said the President, followed by applause.
Continuing his address, President Biden vowed that crime rates were on a steadfast downward trajectory. He stated that the previous year had seen one of the lowest total violent crime rates in almost half a century. This trend he claimed, was evident in murder, assault, rape, robbery incidents, and even extended to crimes such as burglary and property offenses which experienced a significant decline.
However, an investigative report from Breitbart News on June 24, 2024, revealed inconsistencies with this narrative, referring to the FBI data on lower crime rates in 2022. It emphasized that the crime stats were possibly incomplete due to the conspicuous absence of data from numerous police departments.
This critique of the FBI’s report was echoed by other media outlets, creating a rising clamor for clarification from the federal agency. After several months of such widespread demand, the FBI finally remedied its earlier report to reflect the accurate crime data.
October 16, 2024 marked the day when Real Clear Investigations unveiled another crucial problem associated with the FBI’s initial crime survey. As per the revised figures, when the FBI first disseminated the “final” crime stats for 2022 in September 2023, it had announced a 2.1% dip in the nation’s violent crime rate.
Soon thereafter, this figure became a key talking point for the Democratic Party, brought up repeatedly to counterbalance former President Donald Trump’s assertions of soaring crime. However, subsequent amendments in the FBI figures hinted at a rather disturbing development.
In contrast to its initial publication, the FBI’s revised crime statistics depicted a 4.5% surge in violent crime during 2022. Apart from an overall uptick, the updated stats provided a more comprehensive account of numerous individual crime categories, incorporating a far greater number of incidents than previously reported.
The rectified figures from the FBI indicated that there were 1,699 additional murders in 2022 than initially reported. Rape incidents amounted to 7,780 more than before, while the number of robberies and aggravated assaults saw a stiff increase by over 33,000 and 37,000 respectively.
The severity of these revisions prompted Carl Moody, a notable crime researcher at the College of William & Mary, to remark on the unusual necessity for such an extensive correction in the FBI’s crime reports. This level of amendment to crime reports had been previously unheard in the 21st century.
Moody further recalled, ‘As per my study of total violent crime data from 2004 to 2022, I didn’t observe any revisions from the time period between 2004 and 2015. Even during 2016 to 2020, the changes, if any, remained minuscule, less than a percentage point.’
Moody’s observations underscored the gravity of the sudden, sweeping changes in crime statistics for 2021 and 2022 post-amendment. The absence of an official explanation from the FBI for these amendments not only cast a shadow of doubt on the 2022 data, but also called into question the reliability of FBI crime data as a whole.
PRESIDENT TRUMP WAS RIGHT ABOUT EVERYTHING https://t.co/NPJgEhvq96 pic.twitter.com/veMBAzqN8j
— Trump War Room (@TrumpWarRoom) October 16, 2024