Opinion | The author's opinion does not necessarily reflect Sarah Palin's view.
A previous FBI announcement indicated a 2.1% drop in the violent crime rate for 2022. The statistic was widely used by Democrats to counter assertions of increasing crime levels, but has recently seen a major revision.
“Violent crime dropped for third straight year in 2023, including murder and rape,” USA Today wrote following the release of the data.
“Violent crime is dropping fast in the U.S. – even if Americans don’t believe it,” NPR wrote.
“At some point in 2022 … there was just a tipping point where violence started to fall and it just continued to fall,” NPR added.
However, revised data has revealed a 4.5% increase, with thousands more incidents of violent crimes recorded.
The changes were not clearly communicated in the FBI’s September 2024 updates, which has raised concerns among researchers regarding the reliability and transparency of the FBI’s crime statistics.
TRUMP WAS RIGHT.
Will @DavidMuir correct his false “fact check”? pic.twitter.com/gx59l3Lstb https://t.co/PMcOPVwkcH
— Libs of TikTok (@libsoftiktok) October 16, 2024
“I have checked the data on total violent crime from 2004 to 2022,” College of William & Mary professor Carl Moody said. “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.”
“With the media using the 2022 FBI data to tell us for a year that crime was falling, it is disappointing that there are no news articles correcting that misimpression,” Moody added. “We will have to see whether the FBI later also revises the 2023 numbers.”
“It is up to the FBI to explain what they have done, and they haven’t explained these large changes,” Justec Research president Dr. Thomas Marvell said.
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
Meanwhile, alternative data sources, such as the National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS), reported even more significant increases in crime rates, contrasting sharply with FBI figures.
“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,” former head of the DOJ’s Bureau of Justice Statistics Jeffrey Anderson said.
“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,” Anderson added.
The lack of consistency has led to widespread skepticism regarding the FBI’s reporting methods and overall credibility in crime statistics.
“This FBI report is stunning because it now doesn’t state that violent crime in 2022 was much higher than it had previously reported, nor does it explain why the new rate is so much higher, and it issued no press release about this large revision,” University of Georgia professor David Mustard said. “This lack of transparency harms the FBI’s credibility.”
