By I & I Editorial Board, Issues & Insights | October 18, 2024
Readers of I&I know all about how the Biden-Harris regime has been fudging jobs numbers to make monthly gains look bigger than they really are. Turns out, it’s been doing the same with crime statistics … this time to make it look like violent crime is on the way down.
RealClearInvestigations dug into the FBI’s data and found that the law enforcement agency had been criminally misreporting crime statistics in a way that just happened to help Biden-Harris look like it’s been tough on crime.
Last fall, for example, the FBI reported that violent crime had dropped by 2.1% in 2022. That number was celebrated by Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, and the press, which said it was proof that Donald Trump was lying about a crime wave.
RealClearInvestigations discovered that the FBI had secretly updated its crime statistics, and instead of showing a 2.1% drop in violent crime, there was a 4.5% increase in 2022.
These weren’t minor revisions in the crime numbers.
Where the FBI originally reported 21,288 fewer cases of violent crime in 2022, its revised number shows a 58,741 increase. Instead of a slight drop in the number of burglaries, the new numbers show an increase of nearly 30,000. Every category was revised sharply upward.
RealClearInvestigations quotes Carl Moody, a professor at the College of William & Mary who specializes in studying crime, who says that “the huge changes in 2021 and 2022, especially without an explanation, make it difficult to trust the FBI data.”
This change also let the FBI claim that violent crime dropped 3.5% in 2023 because it was comparing its current crime statistics for 2023 with the secretly revised higher numbers in 2022, once again misleading the public about the true picture of crime in the U.S.,
Kamala Harris bragged about “great progress” and that “we’re not stopping now” and news sites such as USA Today shouted that “Violent crime dropped for third straight year in 2023, including murder and rape.”
But who can trust anything the FBI reports these days? Or any other federal agency?
This is the same kind of numbers game the Biden-Harris’ Bureau of Labor Statistics has been playing to inflate job gains each month. For instance, BLS claimed that in the first seven months of this year, the economy produced 365,000 more new jobs than were actually created. (See: “The Biden-Harris Jobs Con Continues.”)
There were reasons to doubt these “official” numbers all along
In the case of jobs, the number of payroll jobs being “created” was wildly higher than the number of people who, in a separate BLS survey, said they had jobs.
In the case of crime, a separate Bureau of Justice Statistics’ national crime victimization survey showed that the number of victims of violent crime was a staggering 41% higher in 2023 than in 2020. (See: “The Media’s Criminal Misreporting On Crime.”)
The media are either willfully misleading the public to help Democrats keep the White House, or they are just plain stupid. Either way, they continue to let Biden and Harris brag about a phony decline in crime and a phony increase in jobs.
Issues & Insights was founded by seasoned journalists of the IBD Editorials page. Our mission is to provide timely, fact-based reporting and deeply informed analysis on the news of the day – without fear or favor.
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