President Donald Trump has repeatedly suggested that crime is far worse than government officials care to admit, particularly in Democrat-run cities.

Democratic operatives and the liberal media have claimed the reverse is true, citing incomplete FBI data indicating a drop in violent crime in the first two years of the Biden-Harris administration.

It appears that Trump was correct when he told Time magazine that the "FBI fudged the numbers" and possibly also when he suggested during the second presidential debate that the FBI data "was a fraud" — just as he appears to have been correct about U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics' bogus jobs numbers.

The Crime Prevention Research Center recently reported that the FBI stealthily changed its crime data for 2022 — a year in which cities like Phoenix, New York City, and Los Angeles failed to submit crime data.

Whereas the bureau originally claimed that violent crime fell by 2.1% that year — a claim USA Today and other publications have made ample use of for Democrat officials' benefit — the FBI subsequently adjusted its statistics to reflect that violent crime actually spiked by at least 4.5%.

'Now we know the truth.'

The FBI did not bother highlighting this narrative-destroying change in its Sept. 23 press release concerning national crime statistics.

RealClearInvestigations noted that the change was only cryptically referred to in a footnote in the September Uniform Crime Reporting Program report on crime in 2023, which stated, "The 2022 violent crime rate has been updated for inclusion in CIUS, 2023."

According to the CPRC, with the adjustments, "there is a net increase of 80,029 more violent crimes, 1,699 more murders, 7,780 more rapes, 33,459 more robberies, and 37,091 more aggravated assaults."

"There you go," responded Rep. Dan Bishop (R-N.C.).

Republican Rep. Darrell Issa (Calif.) responded to the FBI's quiet correction, "You'll never believe it. FBI reporting was wrong and violent crime did not in fact go down."

"This is why the regime wants to censor 'disinformation and misinformation,'" tweeted Auron MacIntyre, podcast host and columnist at Blaze Media. "Our institutions now lie to us regularly for political gain."

Elon Musk's America PAC wrote, "They want to give you the illusion that cities are safe, but now we know the truth."

"I have checked the data on total violent crime from 2004 to 2022," Carl Moody, professor of economics at the College of William and Mary and research director at the CPRC, 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."

RealClearInvestigations indicated the FBI did not respond to "repeated requests" for comment.

By other measures, it appears things are actually far worse than the FBI and media have let on — again, comporting with Trump's sense of how thing have deteriorated.

John Lott Jr., president of the CPRC, told Blaze Media co-founder Glenn Beck last month, "There are two measures that we have of crime, and the media just seems to only be looking at one of these measures and not realizing what it's measuring."

"So the two measures are the FBI's measure of crimes reported to police," continued Lott. "And then there's the Bureau of Justice Statistics measure, called the National Crime Victimization data, which gets a measure of total crime, both reported and unreported. Prior to 2020, these two sets of numbers generally went up and down together. But since 2020, they have been going at opposite directions."

Lott noted that in 2022, for instance, when the FBI originally claimed violent crime dropped by just over 2%, the National Crime Victimization Survey reflected a massive spike in the violent victimization rate — from 16.5 victimizations per 1,000 persons in 2021 to 23.5 per 1,000 in 2022.

Lott said that was the "largest percentage increase that we've ever seen."

While the FBI contends violent crime has fallen under the Biden-Harris administration, the NCVS, which doesn't measure murder, reportedly indicated violent crime jumped 55% between 2020 and 2023.

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