Crime Up Significantly

We've talked about the FBI's Uniform Crime Reporting many times since this blog's inception decades ago. One of the talking points of the Biden administration has been that crime has been falling during its tenure; that seems to be out of order with the evidence of our eyes, but such evidence is anecdotal, not statistical. 

Well, it turns out the eyes have it.

When the FBI originally released the “final” crime data for 2022 in September 2023, it reported that the nation’s violent crime rate fell by 2.1%. This quickly became, and remains, a Democratic Party talking point to counter Donald Trump’s claims of soaring crime.

But the FBI has quietly revised those numbers, releasing new data that shows violent crime increased in 2022 by 4.5%. The new data includes thousands more murders, rapes, robberies, and aggravated assaults.

The Bureau – which has been at the center of partisan storms – made no mention of these revisions in its September 2024 press release. 

John Lott, the author here, has been on this for a while. I admit that I initially took the UCR statistics at face value, as most of the ways I was familiar with seeing them manipulated happen at the local level rather than the Federal level. Douglas warned me in the comments to the post on murder rates that major cities were choosing to omit themselves from the statistics, which is a local-level manipulation but on a grand scale. 

(Also, here is an Obama-era exception in which the Feds were changing rates by changing definitions, though that change appears to have been ideological rather than strictly manipulatory: they wanted rape understood differently from the traditional definition of 'physically forced to have sex.')

This, however, is apparently the FBI putting its own finger on the scales at the Federal level. Lott notes that this kind of major 'stealth edit' is becoming a standard practice.

The actual changes in crimes are extensive. The updated data for 2022 report that there were 80,029 more violent crimes than in 2021. There were an additional 1,699 murders, 7,780 rapes, 33,459 robberies, and 37,091 aggravated assaults. The question naturally arises: should the FBI’s 2023 numbers be believed?...

The FBI isn’t the only government agency that has been revising its data. The Bureau of Labor Statistics massively overestimated the number of jobs created during the year that ended in March by 818,000 people.

If you're going to go that far towards destroying your credibility as a source of data, why not wait another month to publish the revisions? Obviously the desired effect was achieved -- the headlines were that crime was 'down,' and the statistical revision won't make the NYT or CBS News. Still, you could have avoided even having it here by putting off your revisions a short time.