There was a claim that the toothpaste company Colgate used to make all the time on television. They said that “80 percent of dentists recommend Colgate.” Technically, the figure was accurate. Colgate did send around a survey. And when they got the survey back, 80% of dentists had indeed indicated that they recommended Colgate. But ultimately, the advertising regulators came down hard on Colgate and forced them to pull the ad off the air. And they did that because Colgate left out an important piece of information: the survey allowed dentists to recommend multiple brands. So, yes, 80% of dentists did recommend Colgate. But 80% of dentists also recommended Colgate’s competitors.

We’re bombarded with misrepresentations like this so often — from politicians, advertisers and so on — that pretty much everyone understands that statistics are very often misleading, at best. That’s why we have the famous line: “There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics.”

But even given that baseline of skepticism that we all have, it’s still very easy to fall into the trap of assuming that some statistics are reliable. Take the murder rate, for example. That’s the number of murders that occur, divided by the population. You’d think that it would be pretty hard for the government to fudge that data. After all, if somebody gets murdered, the odds are very high that someone’s going to notice it and file a report. Unlike crimes such as shoplifting or assault, which often go unreported now because everyone knows the D.A. won’t do anything about it, murder is still prosecuted — even in places like San Francisco or New York. For now.

So when the FBI declared last month that violent crimes, including murders, had declined for two years in a row, it was natural for a lot of people to take that claim seriously. Democrats immediately used it as a talking point. They said it was proof that Donald Trump was wrong when he said during the debate that this country has become more dangerous under Joe Biden and Kamala Harris. Here’s that moment, one more time:

The “revised” FBI data now says crime is up. Here is Trump being “factchecked” by ABC News on the FBI data that has now been to be wrong. Trump was right. Again. pic.twitter.com/XeY2p7bRum

— Clay Travis (@ClayTravis) October 16, 2024

When I covered this at the time, I didn’t take any issue with the FBI’s actual data. They claimed they had finally incorporated the vast majority of police departments into their calculations, and I took them at their word. Instead, I pointed out that the FBI’s data, by its own terms, is incomplete and therefore misleading. It’s a bit like the Colgate ad. It tells you something that’s technically true, but it doesn’t tell you anywhere near the full story. Specifically, the FBI’s data only counts crimes that are reported to law enforcement. And there’s a lot of evidence that people don’t report most crimes to law enforcement.

In fact, that evidence comes directly from the DOJ. According to the DOJ’s survey of crime victims, last year, less than 50% of “violent victimizations” were reported to the police. Less than 33% of property crime victimizations were reported. Only 43% of robberies were reported. A relatively large number of auto thefts were reported — more than 70% — presumably because people needed to file those claims in order to get an insurance payout. Otherwise, we can assume no one would’ve reported those crimes either, because no one expects prosecutors or law enforcement to do anything at this point.

WATCH: The Matt Walsh Show

But the DOJ’s survey of crime victims doesn’t include murder victims, for the obvious reason that murder victims can’t answer the survey. So last month, on this point, I conceded that the FBI’s murder data — and only their murder data — was probably accurate. After all, how could the FBI and local law enforcement agencies possibly be undercounting the amount of murders that are being reported? These are not easy crimes to cover up.

Well it turns out that I shouldn’t have conceded even that point. Even on this basic, straightforward statistic — which measures how many people are getting killed in this country — our federal government has been cooking the numbers. And they’ve been doing it in a way that makes it very clear they’re trying to hide information from the public. This is not an innocent error. It’s deliberate, purposeful and malicious. Real Clear Investigations has just reported that, without alerting anyone, the FBI has just revised its violent crime statistics for 2022. And the new data shows that thousands more rapes, robberies and murders occurred in that year, as compared to what they previously told us.

The FBI’s original claim — which was that violent crime had fallen by more than 2% in 2022 — has now been revised. Now they say that violent crime actually increased by 4.5% that year. Specifically, somehow the FBI now says that it missed nearly 8,000 rapes, 33,000 robberies, 37,000 aggravated assaults, and 1,700 murders in 2022.

How did that happen, exactly? These are massive revisions, but the most incredible one is that last figure. How do you miss 1,700 murders? This isn’t one or two cold cases that slipped through the cracks. These aren’t people who just disappeared and the FBI found their bodies six months later. People were killed and the police were alerted. And they just weren’t included in the initial count we received from the FBI — the same count that was used to discredit Donald Trump as a liar during the debate

Here’s how Real Clear Investigations explained what happened: 

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.

Yes, you heard that correctly. The FBI “extrapolates” from partial data. And they also just make up estimates from cities that report no data at all. According to Jeffrey Anderson, who ran the DOJ’s Bureau of Justice Statistics from 2017 to 2021:

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.

We’re meant to assume that this is one of those innocent mistakes — that only ever goes in the same direction. It’s like that jobs report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics just a few weeks ago — the one that over-estimated job growth by about 800,000 jobs. We’re supposed to conclude that these statistical errors aren’t deliberate, and that the federal government isn’t trying to cook the books in order to help Kamala Harris’ failing campaign.

But there’s a very clear reason to doubt that explanation, especially in the case of this FBI revision. That’s because the FBI’s revised data — which shows all the violent crimes they missed — wasn’t announced anywhere. The FBI did a stealth edit on their own report three weeks ago.

And it’s only coming to light now because investigative journalists at Real Clear Investigations noticed this line at the bottom of the FBI’s data:

The 2022 violent crime rate has been updated for inclusion in C.I.U.S., 2023.

Nowhere did the FBI explain what the update showed, exactly. They didn’t hold a press conference and explain why they undercounted tens of thousands of serious crimes that impacted very real victims. Instead, on a hunch, Real Clear Investigations had to pull up the charts and graphics and do a comparison. Even when the FBI released a press release last month, claiming that violent crime had fallen again in 2023, they didn’t mention that their statistics from 2022 were completely wrong.

So obviously, this looks a lot like malice. And of course, we have no reason whatsoever to trust that their data from 2023 is remotely accurate, either.

We are at the point now where the government can’t be trusted to tell us anything — even information as basic as the number of Americans who are being murdered every year. If they can’t even get that right — or if they’re willing to lie about it — then there’s absolutely no reason to trust these people when they say things like the Earth is getting too hot, or that illegal immigrants don’t really commit that many crimes, or anything at all. We are ruled by people who are constantly finding new ways to discredit themselves.

MATT WALSH’S ‘AM I RACIST?’ COMING TO DAILYWIRE+ OCT. 28

If there’s anything amusing about this whole situation, it’s that there is *one* crime statistic that, according to the FBI, keeps going up, like clockwork. That’s the number of hate crimes in this country. When I looked into the hate crimes reporting system earlier this year, I found that it’s completely meaningless. There are no standards at all. The reported incidents don’t even have to be crimes, in some cases. And yet, the figure always manages to go up. It’s never undercounted. And we all know why that is. The federal government can use “hate crimes” as a political tool. They want to report more hate crimes, so they can punish all those dreaded MAGA Republicans who are beating up Asians at 2:00am in San Francisco. But in an election year, they want to say that violent crimes are going down. So they just make up those numbers, too.

That means, among other things, that the so-called “fact-checking” industry needs to end immediately. It’s no use citing government reports when they’re worse than useless. We should never have another “fact-check” during a live presidential debate ever again. And it also means that, if Democrats really care about “misinformation” — as they so often claim to — then they should demand the immediate dismantling of these government agencies that are apparently incapable of telling the truth. The misinformation, as always, is coming from inside the house.

To be very clear about this: They just tried to memory-hole the murders of nearly 2,000 Americans. That’s what they were just caught doing. And even if you think it was unintentional, it’s still very clear that they tried to cover up their alleged “mistake.” That is how little they care about American citizens.They’ll deny you police protection and then lie to the public about your death if you’re murdered. Some people might call that depraved. They might call it treasonous and immoral. But for the Biden-Harris administration, it’s just the cost of doing business in an election year.