WASHINGTON, DC - The Biden-Harris administration and their media sycophants continue to claim that violent crime is “down” under the current administration in an attempt to counter claims by former President Trump that crime has instead skyrocketed under the current regime. As recently as Wednesday night, Kamala Harris made the same claim during an appearance on Fox News.
However, there are a couple of issues with these claims. Law Enforcement Today has recently published two articles where we debunked these claims, using the Crime Victimization Survey, a significantly more reliable and comprehensive measure of crime in America than the FBI-published National Incident-Based Reporting System, or NIBRS. This survey, conducted by the Bureau of Justice Statistics, provides a more inclusive and accurate picture of crime in the country.
In one report, written initially for Crime in America and republished with permission, the piece used three different crime reports–FBI-reported data for 2023, FBI numbers for the first six months of 2024 from NIBRS, and the National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS) for 2023.
It is essential to understand the differences between the various reports. NIBRS covers crimes reported to law enforcement agencies, who then furnish the information to the FBI. The Crime Victimization Survey is a much more inclusive document offered by the Bureau of Justice Statistics. Both operate under the Department of Justice.
While the FBI initially reported violent crime was down significantly, the NCVS paints a much different picture. According to that document, there was a 44 percent increase in violent crime, utterly contrary to what the FBI reported.
However, recent revisions have brought these claims into question. As we've seen with other government-issued reports, such as unemployment, job creation, and inflation, statistics are sometimes 'updated.' The FBI quietly made a significant update to the 2022 crime data, which aligns with the NCVS and shows that violent crime increased, not decreased, as Biden-Harris and their media supporters have claimed. This revelation should raise serious concerns and caution about the reliability of the data we're presented with.
John Lott, founder and president of the Crime Prevention Research Center, told Fox News Digital that when the FBI released its annual crime data for 2022 last year, it showed a 2.1% decrease in violent crime compared to 2021. Democrats seized on that report to claim their policies (whatever they are) had led to a reduction in crime, which they said blew holes in Donald Trump and Republicans' claims that the current administration’s policies on crime and the border were working. Not so much.
The revised data showed a net increase of 80,029 violent crimes in 2022 over 2021. Lott told Fox that under the definition of violent crime, there were an additional 1,699 murders, 7,780 rapes, 33,459 robberies, and 37,091 aggravated assaults that year.
“To give people an idea of the size of the change, when the 2022 data came out in September 2023, they initially reported that violent crime had fallen by 2.1% in 2022…That’s the final data, supposedly, for 2022. The revision of that final data that came out last month now claims that rather than the 2.1% drop, that there was actually a 4.5% increase in violent crime that occurred in 2022. That’s a 6.6 percentage point change there,” Lott told Fox News Digital.
“It’s from a drop to an increase. And, you know, the bizarre thing to me is, for a year after the 2022 data was put out, we were having headlines, news articles after news articles saying, ‘Violent crime is falling, people mistakenly or erroneously believe that it’s increasing.’ And, you know, and they were relying on this data,” Lott continued. “But you don’t see any corrections in the news, saying, ‘Oops, the FBI data that we relied on was wrong, that rather than a drop, there was actually an increase that had occurred.”
Biden has used the flawed FBI statistics to claim that due to his leadership, violent crime had fallen, even calling the violent crime “drops” “historic.”
“This year, the homicide and violent crime rates have continued their rapid decline from their peaks during the last administration,” Biden said in a statement only last month. “...Communities across our country are safer now than when I took office.”
When the revised numbers were released, the Trump campaign took a victory lap, feeling vindicated that they had been right all along.
“The federal government lied about Biden’s cognitive decline, lied about the job numbers, and now we learn they lied about crime numbers too,” Trump campaign spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt told Fox News Digital. “Kamala Harris must admit she’s wrong and address how she plans to bring down the rising crime crisis. Every mainstream media reporter who was quick to correct President Trump must now cover this new revelation if they have any shred of integrity left.”
Leavitt may have been referring to ABC News anchor David Muir, who, in a debate between Trump and Harris, “fact-checked” Trump when he claimed that violent crime was through the roof. Muir said that the claim was false and that the violent crime rate was down. Muir, however, never fact-checked any of Harris’s truth stretchers.
Despite the revised numbers, the White House continues to take credit for lower violent crime and also cites politically connected police chiefs in large U.S. cities who claim violent crime is down, likely also using flawed NIBRS information.
Lott indicated he stumbled upon the change the FBI made in violent crime statistics for 2021 and 2022, with the agency seemingly trying to either downplay or hide the actual violent crime stats.
“For 2022 and 2021, in particular, they had some changes for a few of the previous years, but they were very small. The changes for 2021 and 2022 were very large. You know, I looked through the press release that the FBI had put out, there was no mention of them having changed the data for earlier years. And surely no mention of the large change that had occurred. I looked through the Uniform Crime Report summary report that the FBI puts out, and there was no mention of the size of the change. There’s one footnote there that vaguely mentions that they had updated data for 2022. No mention about updating it for 2021 or any other time,” Lott said, calling the discovery “shocking,” Fox News Digital wrote.
In an article for Real Clear Investigations this past week, Lott argued that given the updates to the 2022 statistics, it is reasonable to question the 2023 results, which showed an estimated 3% drop in violent crimes compared to 2022.
“Without the increase, the drop in violent crime in 2023 would have been less than half as large–only 1.6% instead of the reported drop of 3.5%,” he wrote.
Our research found that the NCVS is a much more accurate barometer of crime than NIBRS. For example, in 2022, approximately 40 percent of violent crime was reported to law enforcement. In the case of property crime, it was roughly 30 percent. In other words, 60 percent of violent crimes and 70 percent of property crimes were not reported to police.
For comparison purposes, in 2022, 12,000 hate crimes were reported to the FBI, while approximately 250,000 hate crime incidents were recorded by the NCVS. Less than 5 percent of hate crimes were reported to the FBI.
In 2023, the NCVS showed that violent crime reporting rose slightly to approximately 45 percent, however, the FBI showed a 3 percent decrease.
To explain thoroughly, the FBI data represents reported crime, not total crime. As shown above, just over 40 percent of violent crime is reported to law enforcement.
As Law Enforcement Today reported last month, the NCVS dates back to the Nixon administration and is regarded as one of the most extensive federal surveys on any topic month. The survey questions approximately 250,000 Americans annually about their experience with crime. If they answer affirmatively, they are asked additional questions, such as the nature of the crime, if it was reported to authorities, the demographics of the suspect, and other related information.
An opinion piece in the Wall Street Journal it notes that the NCVS is a more reliable barometer of crime than the FBI’s statistics for several reasons.
First, the NCVS represents final statistics, not partial-year preliminary figures such as the FBI releases.
Second, in 2021, the FBI switched to a new reporting system that made it virtually impossible to compile year-to-year comparisons between before and after the change.
Third, the NCVS is a nationally representative sampling. The FBI, however, could not obtain data from many law enforcement agencies, including the Los Angeles Police Department, the third largest police agency in the country. It also does not use the same mix of agencies year to year.
Fourth, while the DCJS operates under the auspices of the Census Bureau, the Wall St. Journal wrote that “the FBI isn’t considered a principal statistical agency” by the government, so its ability to compensate for missing data is limited.
Lastly, as mentioned above, FBI statistics rely on data for crimes reported to the police, while the NCVS includes crimes whether or not they are reported to authorities. The FBI data simply does not capture a majority of actual crimes, so it is an unreliable barometer of the true crime issue in the U.S.
With the current social unrest surrounding the war in the Middle East, the unhinged nature of some on the political left if Trump prevails in the election, and the influx of violent criminal gangs allowed into the U.S. by the Biden-Harris open border policies, it doesn’t appear likely those statistics will trend down anytime soon. A change in administration, however, may change that trajectory.
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