A lot of crime data comes from the FBI.

I used to think that meant you could trust it. Boy was I dumb.

These days, I may like the FBI slightly better than the ATF, but that's a distinction without a meaningful difference. That's like saying I like AIDS slightly better than Ebola.

Luckily, President Donald Trump is making a lot of changes. He's already dismissed some senior agents who were reportedly well-known for their political animosity against anyone who wasn't a Democrat and in allowing that animosity to drive their actions at the FBI.

But John Lott has a suggestion for the president that, frankly, I agree with completely.

There is a lot of attention on the Trump administration removing dozens of Department of Justice (DOJ) and FBI officials involved in charging 1,500 Jan. 6 defendants, but one area of politicization in the FBI and DOJ that isn’t getting attention: crime data.

The ability to manipulate and distort crime data allows those distorting the data to control the political debate.

I’ve seen many cases of politicized data. Until January 2021, I worked in the U.S. Department of Justice as the senior advisor for research and statistics in the Office of Justice Programs, and part of my job was to evaluate the FBI’s active shooting reports. During my time with the DOJ, I discovered that the FBI either missed or misidentified many cases of civilians using guns to stop attacks. For instance, the FBI continues to report that armed citizens stopped only 14 of the 350 active shooter cases identified between 2014 to 2023.

The Crime Prevention Research Center (CPRC), which I run, has found many more missed cases and is keeping an updated list. As such, the CPRC numbers tell a much different story: Out of 515 active shooter incidents from 2014 to 2023, armed citizens stopped 180, saving countless innocent lives. Our numbers even excluded 27 cases where a law-abiding citizen with a gun stopped an attacker before he could fire a shot.

Overall, the CPRC estimates that law-abiding citizens with guns have stopped more than 35 percent of active shootings over the last decade and 39.6 percent in the last five years. This figure is almost nine times higher than the four percent estimate made by the FBI.

There's more there, of course, and you should go over to The Federalist and read that--after you finish this piece, of course--but some other high points include the fact that such a large number of defensive gun uses weren't included in the data that Lott finds it implausible that this was accidental and how the FBI quietly revised crime data upward after the media's blitz trying to paint the Biden administration as being effective at reducing violent crime.

They did this quietly and tried to downplay it, but not until it started playing a role in the presidential election.

Lott also has some harsh words for the CDC, which are completely warranted.

However, with the FBI, this is something that can, in theory, be done pretty easily via executive action. Especially after Kash Patel is confirmed, which seems likely as things stand as of this writing.

And it needs to happen.

The FBI is, at least in theory, a disinterested party that can collect data on criminality and put that data together in a way that is beneficial not just to policymakers, but also the general public.

The fact that it looks to me like they're playing games demonstrates something is very wrong at the FBI.

We have a right to expect better from our federal law enforcement.