The FBI secretly revised its 2022 data to reflect an increase in crime after initially reporting a decline, and experts say the flawed numbers are just the tip of the iceberg. It is said that

Initially, it was reported that violent crime would decrease by 2.1% in 2022, but the bureau abruptly revised that number to reveal that violent crime had increased by 4.5% instead. Experts told the Daily Caller News Foundation that the FBI’s metrics include incomplete data collection, confusion over reporting standards, omissions of unreported crimes, and problems inherent in measuring crime nationally. It is said that there are problems such as problems.

Democratic Party, Corporate Media outlet and political critic have on a daily basis quoted FBI data Claim It recently touted newly released numbers for 2023, saying crime has fallen under President Joe Biden. show Violent crime fell by 3% that year. But the sudden reversal in the data for 2022 raises further questions about whether we can get a clear picture of crime across the country.

The agency’s standards for reporting crimes do not necessarily include all 911 calls, and in certain cases artificially reduce the number of crimes reflected in national data, according to the Crime Prevention Research Center. Director John Lott told DCNF.

“In order for the FBI to count it, it has to be filled out in a police report,” Lott said. “In recent years, we’ve had a situation where if you call a 911 operator and say it’s not an emergency or the perpetrator is gone, you have to go to the police station and give the police a report.”

The FBI relies on voluntary reporting from police departments across the country, and data from the majority of agencies each year is always excluded, including data for 2023. report Say. In 2023, approximately 85% of ministries and agencies participated, and approximately 3,000 ministries and agencies that were registered but did not report were excluded. (Related: ‘Influential’ police group supporting Harris is actually run by Democratic Party political operatives)

Police departments can report data to the FBI through two widely used reporting standards: the National Incident-Based Reporting System (NIBRS) or the Summary Reporting System (SRS), according to the bureau’s 2023 report.

NIBRS contains incident-specific details about each crime, including data on race, gender, and age of victims and offenders. According to To the FBI. SRS simply counts crimes and does not have data on specific incidents like NIBRS.

In 2021, when the FBI switched to only NIBRS and retired the previous, less detailed SRS, participation rates plummeted to just 53%. According to to the Congressional Research Service. In response, the FBI has allowed agencies to use SRS in conjunction with NIBRS starting in 2022, Charles Lehman, a fellow at the Manhattan Institute, told DCNF.

“In 2022 and 2023, cities that are not NIBRS compliant will be able to report under the SRS standards and are still reporting under the SRS,” Lehman said. “So you get crime counts, but you don’t get the information that you get from NIBRS data.”

In a statement to the DCNF, the FBI blamed 2021 data being leaked and skewing the 2022 numbers because it used a model based on 2021 numbers to predict 2022 numbers. They did not say why they did not correct the record more publicly.

Auto theft is one of the most accurately measured crimes because it requires a police report. insurance Lott told DCNF. The FBI reported a significant 12.6% increase in auto theft in 2023, with the number of incidents increasing by more than 20%, especially in large cities.

“The FBI’s Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR) program collects and publishes data voluntarily reported by law enforcement agencies,” a bureau spokesperson for the UCR program told DCNF in response to questions about the 2023 data. told. “Because the UCR program and the National Crime Victim Survey have different objectives, use different methods, and focus on somewhat different aspects of crime, the complementary information they produce together is much more important than either alone. provides a more comprehensive understanding of the country’s crime problem than that produced by

The FBI told the DCNF that the data relies on voluntary reporting and that by combining UCR data with the National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS), a national survey that considers unreported and reported crimes, He emphasized that it provides the best overall picture of crime.

In some cases, the differences between the two data sources can paint a completely different picture of how serious America’s crime problem is. In 2022, there was a huge 45% difference between the number of violent crime victims in the NCVS and the number of violent crimes reported by the FBI. According to Join the Marshall Project in 2023.

While new, data It shows that while the number of robberies nationwide is down 0.2%, only 42% of robberies are reported to the police. According to Until the 2023 NCVS survey.

Heritage Foundation Senior Legal Research Fellow Zach Smith told DCNF that the FBI will use existing data to extrapolate crime numbers, similar to the 2021 numbers, to fill in the gaps created by underreporting from each department. He said there are also.

“The FBI is trying to compensate in some ways by using statistical modeling to fill in the gaps, but it’s not working particularly well,” Smith said. “So, unfortunately, the FBI’s crime statistics don’t accurately portray what’s going on.”

Additionally, because crime is a “very local” phenomenon, it may be a mistake to think of crime as something that can be accurately measured at a national level, Smith told DCNF.

“Crime is very localized, so looking at local crime data will give you the most accurate picture of what’s going on in terms of crime,” Smith told DCNF. “It’s going to depend on what’s going on in the city and in the neighborhoods within that city. If you look back over the last four, five or six years, in many cases, today’s violent crime rates are , I think you’ll find that it’s still much higher than it was before the George Floyd riots and other riots that have happened over the past few years.”

Democrats have been quick to tout the FBI data as evidence that crime is declining across the country under the Biden-Harris administration. Recently, transportation secretary Pete Buttigieg is radio waves He praised the decline in reported crime and claimed that “crime has increased” under the Trump administration.

So was Trump. fact confirmed ABC anchor David Muir cited FBI crime data during the second presidential debate. Similarly, CNN’s Van Jones, White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre, NBC’s Joe Scarborough, and killed Others parroted the same claims about crimes.

“It’s almost meaningless to say that crime is increasing or crime is decreasing in the United States,” Lehman told DCNF. “Crime is highly concentrated in cities, and concentrated in very small areas within those cities. This is a fundamental criminological insight, so it explains what’s happening in large cities. And violent crime is still on the rise in some large cities.

FBI data for 2023 shows robberies remain flat nationally, but it’s a different story in cities hit by crime that year. robbery incident chicago The number of cases jumped to 11,933, the highest in a decade, and in Washington, D.C., the number was 67%. undulation In an incident.

Similarly, Auckland has seen a 38% jump in robberies from 2022 to 2023, accusing the city of “failing to help” local residents, including Oscar Edwards’ restaurant, which was robbed twice in February. Businesses were hit hard.

“If nothing changes, we’re just going to start becoming a ghost town,” said Shari Godinez, executive director of Koreatown Northgate, which represents Oakland businesses. said CNN.

According to a poll conducted by San Francisco-based political research group GrowSF, nearly half of San Francisco’s crimes are never reported, and 42 percent of the city’s citizens are victims of more than one crime in a year.

“The problem of violent crime is much more serious than we are saying today, especially when many on the left cite FBI crime statistics as evidence for their claims,” ​​Smith told DCNF.

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