By Wallace White, The Daily Caller News Foundation | October 20, 2024
The FBI quietly revised its 2022 data to reflect an increase in crime after initially reporting it had decreased, and experts say that the flawed figures are just the tip of the iceberg.
It was initially reported that violent crime decreased by 2.1% in 2022, but the Bureau suddenly revised that figure, revealing that violent crime increased by 4.5% instead. Experts told the Daily Caller News Foundation that the FBI’s metrics are plagued with problems, such as incomplete data collection, confusion about reporting standards, the omission of unreported crime as well as the inherent problems of measuring crime nationally.
Democrats, corporate media outlets and political pundits have routinely cited the FBI’s data to claim that crime has gone down under President Joe Biden, most recently touting newly-released figures for 2023, which show a 3% drop in violent crime that year. However, the sudden reversal in the 2022 data raises more questions about whether a clear picture can be ascertained about crime across the nation.
The agency’s criteria for a reported crime does not necessarily include all 911 calls, which artificially depresses the number of crimes reflected in the national data in certain cases, Crime Prevention Research Center Director John Lott told the DCNF.
“In order for the FBI to count it, a police report has to be filled out,” Lott said. “Over the last few years, we have a situation where if you call a 911 operator and you say it’s not an emergency, or that the criminal has gone away, you’d have to go down to the police station to fill out a police report.”
The FBI relies on voluntary reporting from police departments across the nation, and every year always leaves out data from a significant portion of agencies, the 2023 data report says. Around 85% of departments and agencies in 2023 participated, leaving out around 3,000 departments and agencies who were enrolled, but did not report.
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, such as data on the race, gender and age of victims and offenders, according to the FBI. SRS simply counts crimes and does not have data on each specific incident like NIBRS.
In 2021, when the FBI switched to exclusively NIBRS and dropped the old, less detailed SRS, the participation rate plummeted to just 53%, according to the Congressional Research Service. In response, the FBI allowed agencies to use SRS in conjunction with NIBRS from 2022 onwards, Charles Lehman, fellow at the Manhattan Institute, told the DCNF.
“In 2022 and 2023 they say cities that are not NIBRS-compliant can report under the SRS standard, and they’re reporting under SRS today,” Lehman said. “So you get the crime counts but you don’t get the stuff that comes in with the NIBRS data.”
The FBI blamed the compromised 2021 data for throwing off the 2022 figures because the agency used a model based on 2021 figures to predict the 2022 numbers in a statement to the DCNF. They did not address why they did not correct the record more publicly.
Motor vehicle theft is one of the most accurately measured crimes, since people have to file police reports in order to get an insurance claim, Lott told the DCNF. The FBI reported a massive 12.6% surge in motor vehicle theft in 2023, particularly in large cities where incidents were up by 20% and higher.
“The FBI’s Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR) Program collects and publishes the data voluntarily reported by law enforcement,” a Bureau spokesperson for the UCR Program told the DCNF when asked about the 2023 data. “Because the UCR Program and the National Crime Victimization Survey have different purposes, use different methods, and focus on somewhat different aspects of crime, the complementary information they produce together provides a more comprehensive understanding of the nation’s crime problem than either could produce alone.”
The FBI emphasized to the DCNF that the data relies on voluntary reporting, and that combining the National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS), a nationwide survey that takes into account unreported and reported crime, with the UCR data provides the best picture of nationwide crime.
Sometimes, the difference in the two data sources can paint vastly different pictures of how bad the crime problem is in the U.S. In 2022, there was a massive 45% difference between the NCVS violent crime victimizations figure and FBI’s reported violent crime figure, according to the Marshall Project in 2023.
While the new data shows a .2% drop in robberies nationally, only 42% of robberies were reported to the police, according to the 2023 NCVS survey.
The FBI also sometimes extrapolates crime numbers from existing data, like it did for 2021’s figures, in order to fill in gaps caused by a lack of reporting from departments, Heritage Foundation Senior Legal Fellow Zack Smith told the DCNF.
“The FBI has tried to make up for that in some sense, with filling in gaps using statistical modeling that hasn’t worked particularly well,” Smith said. “And so because of that, the FBI crime statistics, unfortunately, aren’t painting an accurate picture of what’s happening.”
Additionally, thinking of crime as something that can be measured on a national level accurately might be flawed, as it is a “hyper local” phenomenon, Smith told the DCNF.
“You’re going to get the most accurate picture of what’s happening in terms of crime by looking at local crime data, because crime is hyper localized,” Smith told the DCNF. “It’s going to be driven by what’s happening in cities and neighborhoods within those cities. Go back and look at the past four, five or six years, and I suspect what you’ll see in many cases is that the violent crime rates today are still much higher than they were before the George Floyd riots and the other things that have happened over the past couple of years.”
Democrats have been quick to tout the FBI’s data as evidence of crime declining across the country under the Biden-Harris administration. Recently, Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg took to the airwaves to laud the reported crime drop and claim that “crime was up” under Trump.
Trump was also fact-checked by ABC anchor David Muir during the second presidential debate, citing the FBI crime data. Similarly, CNN’s Van Jones, White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre, Joe Scarborough of NBC and a slew of other figures parroted the same claims on crime.
“Saying crime goes up or crime goes down in the United States is largely meaningless,” Lehman told the DCNF. “Crime is highly concentrated in cities, and in very small areas of those cities, this is a fundamental criminological insight, and so it’s often much more useful to say what is happening in major cities. And in some major cities, crime is violence is still elevated.”
Though the FBI’s 2023 data shows robberies remaining flat nationally, it’s a different story for cities, which were plagued with the crime that year. Robberies in Chicago soared to a decade-high with 11,933 incidents, while Washington, D.C. clocked in a 67% surge in incidents.
Similarly, Oakland experienced a 38% spike in robberies from 2022 to 2023, which has hurt local businesses like Oscar Edwards’ restaurant, which was robbed twice in February as he accused the city of “not helping out.”
“If nothing changes, it’ll just start becoming a ghost town,” Shari Godinez, executive director of Koreatown Northgate, which represents businesses in Oakland, told CNN.
Nearly half of all crime in San Francisco goes completely unreported and 42% of people were victims of multiple crimes in a year, according to a poll done by GrowSF, a San Francisco-based political research group.
“The violent crime problem is much, much worse than many on the left are saying it is today, particularly when they cite to the FBI crime statistics as proof of their point,” Smith told the DCNF.
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