Former President Donald Trump has been hit with numerous “fact-checks” on the campaign trail that have cited FBI statistics to maintain violent crime is falling in America.
However, the bureau quietly adjusted its figures for 2022 in recent weeks — and the new numbers show that offenses actually ticked up overall.
The apparent stealth edit to the bureau’s statistics, first reported by RealClearInvestigations, shows that the raw number of violent crime incidents — including murders, assaults and rapes — rose to 1,256,671 in 2022 from 1,197,930 in 2021, an increase of 4.9%.
In October of 2023, the FBI put out a press release unveiling its national crime data for 2022, which found that “national violent crime decreased an estimated 1.7% in 2022 compared to 2021 estimates.”
Initially, the bureau projected that the violent crime rate relative to the US population had slipped by 2.1% in 2022 compared to 2021.
But the FBI’s adjustment now suggests that the rate of violent crime actually jumped by about 4.5% over the same period.
The upward revision went unmentioned in the bureau’s annual crime figures press release from September of this year, which announced that violent crime dropped by roughly 3% year-over-year in 2023.
The Crime Prevention Research Center first identified the FBI’s subtle fix, citing a spreadsheet breaking down the original data.
“I have checked the data on total violent crime from 2004 to 2022,” College of William & Mary economics professor Carl Moody, who specializes in studying crime, told RealClearInvestigations. “There were no revisions from 2004 to 2015, and from 2016 to 2020, there were small changes of less than one percentage point.
“The huge changes in 2021 and 2022, especially without an explanation, make it difficult to trust the FBI data,” Moody added.
In 2021, the bureau appears to have concluded it overcounted violent crime incidents by 55,786 and undercounted them in 2022 by 24,243.
The FBI did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
During the Sept. 10 presidential debate, Trump was fact-checked by ABC News moderator David Muir, who noted that the “FBI says overall violent crime is coming down in this country.”
Many of the fact checks of Trump’s claims on crime rely on the FBI’s data, which has faced longstanding questions about its reliability.
In 2021, the FBI moved to a new system of collecting crime data — the National Incident-Based Reporting System (NIBRS) and retired its Summary Reporting System (SRS).
NIBRS contains much more detailed crime information than SRS, but law enforcement reporting rates have dropped as municipalities seemingly struggled with the transition.
According to one analysis, the FBI is missing data from about a fifth of key local agencies, while the rate of reporting dipped below 70% in 2021 for the first time in at least two decades.
Beyond the transition trouble, the FBI’s collection data has faced concerns from some experts for being overly reliant on self-reporting of crimes that routinely go unreported.
