When the FBI released its crime statistics for 2022 last September, the agency touted a 2.1% decrease in violent crime. But as Dr. John Lott, head of the Crime Prevention Research Center, has discovered, the FBI quietly revised those stats a few weeks ago, and their most recent data shows violent crime actually increased by 4.5%. 

So why didn't the FBI publicly announce their revised stats instead of burying the crime increase in a brief note on the FBI website? As Lott details, the new figures reveal tens of thousands more crimes than what was originally reported. 

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? 

Without the increase, the drop in violent crime in 2023 would have been less than half as large – only 1.6% instead of the reported drop of 3.5%.

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.

The FBI’s crime stats revisions reveal how much guesswork is involved in even the “final” numbers often seized on by politicians. The FBI doesn’t simply count reported crimes. Instead, it offers estimates by extrapolating data from police departments that report only partial-year data. The Bureau also makes estimates for cities that report no data. The FBI’s method of generating these estimates changes over time, and it affects the figures they report.

Human error can play a factor as well. Crime analyst Jeff Asher recently noted some issues with Oakland's reported crime stats for 2023, which included a shocking 140% increase in violent offenses compared to 2022. That spike was the result of a large number of aggravated assaults in January and October of last year; from 304 aggravated assaults in December 2022 to 2,942 aggravated assaults in January 2023, and 565 aggravated assaults in September 2023 to 3,265 the following month. 

The Oakland PD says those large spikes didn't actually happen, at least not to that degree, and the bad data given to the FBI was the result of "human error". Oakland's end-of-year crime report found the city experienced a 21% increase in violent crime, not the 140% spike that it reported to the FBI. While Oakland may have overcounted aggravated assaults, Asher says human error can cut both ways, and "mistakes happen every year with the FBI data in terms of both over and underreporting." 

While that's undoubtedly the case, Lott spoke to several criminal justice experts who were troubled by the FBI essentially hiding their revised crime data pointing to a rise in violent offenses in 2022. 

"I have checked the data on total violent crime from 2004 to 2022,” Carl Moody, a professor at the College of William & Mary 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.”

“It is up to the FBI to explain what they have done, and they haven’t explained these large changes,” Dr. Thomas Marvell, the president of Justec Research, a criminal justice statistical research organization, told RCI. 

... “The [FBI’s] processes, such as how it tries to ‘estimate’ unreported figures, has long been a black box, even to the Bureau of Justice Statistics – the Department of Justice’s actual statistical agency,” says Jeffrey Anderson, who headed the DOJ’s Bureau of Justice Statistics from 2017 to 2021. 

Anderson said when he headed the Bureau of Justice Statistics, “We definitely would have highlighted in a press release or a report the 6.6% change recorded for 2022, which moved the numbers from a drop to a rise in violent crime.” 

If the FBI had done that, however, it would have undercut the claims of Kamala Harris that crime is falling at historic levels thanks to the Biden/Harris administration. 

Going back and revising the statistics based on additional information isn't unusual or troubling in and of itself. But when the FBI doesn't inform the public that their new statistics showed violent crime increasing instead of declining, that's a problem... especially if the agency hid the rise in violent crime to benefit the current administration and Kamala Harris's campaign.