The FBI has a big transparency problem. For a year, the media has been using the FBI’s estimates of reported crime to claim that crime has been falling. When the FBI released its numbers for 2023 in September 2024, it hid that it had revised its earlier crime data for 2021 and 2022, hiding the increase in 2022 and that there had been a net increase in crime over 2022 and 2023. Just days before an election in which crime has been a major issue, the FBI continues to hide the revisions.

On Thursday, House Oversight and Reform Committee Chair Rep. James Comer, R-Ky., demanded that the FBI explain why it hid this increase even as Democrats and the media have been citing the claimed drop to bolster their election chances.

In responses to reporters over the past couple of weeks, the FBI has claimed: “The FBI stands behind each of our Crime in the Nation publications. In 2022, the estimated violent crime rate decreased 1.7 percent from 2021.”

But the FBI’s revised numbers are clear. The FBI originally reported in October 2023 that the number of reported violent crimes fell from 1,253,716 in 2021 to 1,232,428 in 2022 — a 1.7 percent drop. The numbers released later, in September 2023, showed a rise from 1,197,930 in 2021 to 1,256,671 in 2022 — a 4.9 percent increase. That is a 6.6-point swing.

The FBI didn’t explain the reason for the changed numbers in 2022 in their report nor in their responses to the media. As a former editor for USA Today, David Mastio, wrote about the FBI’s response to inquiry: “Here’s what I’ve learned in decades of covering Washington: When bad news is false, agency press people go out of their way to make it crystal clear that reports are definitely not true. When bad news is true, agency press people spew a wall of fog and bury you under an avalanche of distractions or in this case, contradictions.”

The FBI’s unwillingness to explicitly acknowledge what their own data clearly shows gives the legacy media an excuse for not recognizing the obvious increase in crime.

(The change in the estimated reported violent crime rate, which adjusts for the population changes, is similar and went from a drop of 2.1 percent to an increase of 4.5 percent.)

The increase in 2022 is greater than the FBI’s current estimated drop in reported violence in 2023. The revised numbers show that there were 20,537 more reported violent crimes in 2023 than in 2021.

The FBI ignored mentioning these revisions in its September 2024 press release. The FBI’s “Summary of Crime in the Nation” report contained a one sentence footnote on page 11 that vaguely stated: “The 2022 violent crime rate has been updated for inclusion in CIUS, 2023.” The footnote failed to mention that the numbers increased. One only sees the change by downloading the FBI’s new crime data and comparing it to the file released last year.

“The FBI’s failure to accurately report crime data and be transparent regarding revisions is unacceptable,” notes Comer’s letter to the FBI. Comer demanded “all documents and communications between the FBI and the White House related to the 2021, 2022, and 2023 Crime in the Nation statistics.”

Better Data

The FBI doesn’t simply count the number of crimes reported to police. Some police departments only partially report their data, and others don’t report any data. The FBI doesn’t assume that there were no crimes for those departments; it makes guesses, and how it does so can change. 

However, there is better data on crime than the FBI’s. It’s important to distinguish reported crime from total crime.

For decades, we have known that most crimes aren’t reported to the police. So the U.S. Department of Justice set up the Bureau of Justice Statistics National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS), which surveys 240,000 people each year about whether they have been victims of crime. The NCVS provides a measure of total crime that includes both reported and unreported crime.

The results of the 2023 NCVS, released in mid-September, tell a very different story. From 2019, before Covid, to 2023, NCVS shows a 19 percent increase in rape, robbery, and aggravated assaults. Over just the course of the Biden administration, there was an incredible 55.4 percent increase, though there were many issues that were unique to 2020 due to Covid.

The media and Democrats have focused solely on the FBI data, presumably because they show the desired pattern in crime. But when the FBI secretly revised its data, corporate media refused to run stories acknowledging that the headlines they ran over the last year were wrong.

The politicization of the FBI is aiding Democrats in making these claims.