Opinion | The author's opinion does not necessarily reflect Sarah Palin's view.
Recent revisions to FBI data have validated former President Donald Trump’s assertions regarding escalating crime rates during the Biden administration. “Crime is down all over the world, except here. Crime here is up and through the roof, despite their fraudulent statements that they made,” Trump said when debating Vice President Kamala Harris. “And we have a new form of crime. It’s called migrant crime, and it’s happening at levels that nobody thought possible,” Trump added.
“President Trump, as you know, the FBI says overall violent crime is actually coming down in this country,” ABC News moderator David Muir said.
“Excuse me the FBI defrauded. They were defrauding statements. They didn’t include the worst cities,” Trump pressed.
The FBI’s revisions have revealed a 4.5% rise in violent crime between 2021 and 2022, including notable increases in murders, rapes, robberies, and assaults.
Experts have raised concerns about the FBI’s data reliability, noting significant revisions lacking explanation and omissions of crime statistics from major cities like New York and Los Angeles.
“It’s been over three weeks since the FBI released the revised data. The Bureau’s lack of acknowledgment or explanation about the significant change concerns researchers,” Crime Prevention Research Center president John Lott 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,” College of William & Mary professor Carl Moody said.
“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.
Critics have largely attributed the rising crime rates to factors such as reduced policing, de-carceration, and prioritization of political agendas in the criminal justice system, suggesting that underreporting persists.
The FBI’s data is “unreliable at best and deceptive at worst,” former assistant FBI director Mark Morgan and CLOS Executive Director Sean Kennedy jointly wrote.
“To adjust for the absence of NIBRS [National Incident-Based Reporting System] data, the FBI uses estimates to calculate the total number of offenses that would likely have been reported to law enforcement in aggregate,” the researchers said. “So, there’s a level of uncertainty in the accuracy of the FBI’s data.”
