The FBI quietly released revised numbers recently that reveal that rather than decreasing by 2.1%, violent crime in 2022 actually increased by 4.5%.
According to original research conducted by John Lott, president of the Crime Prevention Research Center (CPRC), the adjustments represent a net increase of 80,029 more violent crimes, including 1,699 more murders, 7,780 more rapes, 33,459 more robberies and 37,091 more aggravated assaults.
“A major weakness for reported crime data is that most crimes aren’t reported to the police,” Lott said in a report on the revised statistics. “Murder has the advantage because the vast majority of murders are reported. But the revised data for 2021 and 2022 shows a net increase of 1,699 more murders. How do you miss 1,699 murders?”
In an October report posted at RealClearInvestigations (RCI), Lott wrote that even three weeks after the revised numbers were released, the FBI hadn’t bothered to explain—or even acknowledge—the significant change.
“I have checked the data on total violent crime from 2004 to 2022,” said Carl Moody, a professor at the College of William & Mary who specializes in studying crime. “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.”
Moody is also concerned that nobody in the mainstream media is reporting on the important story about the increase.
“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 told RCI. “We will have to see whether the FBI later also revises the 2023 numbers.”
That fact is hammered home by an October report claiming to “fact check” both Trump and Harris on their violent crime claims.
“Crime researchers tell CBS News that while both are valuable metrics, the FBI data Harris cites is more reliable, and she is correct that it suggests violent crime is at a near 50-year low,” the report states, completely ignoring the revised statistics released three weeks earlier.
The “fact check” also stated that “Harris’ claim that violent crime dropped to a ‘near 50-year low’ is accurate. But again, using the FBI’s revised statistics—which CBS apparently chose to ignore—that claim is patently false.
Even with the revised data, the FBI numbers grossly under report violent crime because of a number of factors. One of the problems with the FBI data is that not all police agencies report crimes to the FBI; in fact, many stopped doing so in 2021 and 2022. This greatly skews the numbers.
Prior to 2021, about 97% of police departments around the nation reported their crime data to the FBI; however, in 2021, 37% of police departments didn’t report their data. And in 2022, 31% of police departments, including those in big cities like New York City and Los Angeles, weren’t reporting their data to the FBI. Consequently, crime numbers appear substantially lower than they really are.
With the FBI statistics now being unreliable, the true picture concerning violent crime can better be seen by exploring the National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS). And, as Lott pointed out in a recent analysis, although the violent crime rate reported to police declined 1.7% between 2021 and 2022, the National Crime Victimization Survey showed that total violent crime—both reported and unreported—actually jumped substantially from 16.5 to 23.5 per thousand during that same period. Additionally, violent crime in 2022 was above the rate of the last year before the pandemic (in 2019) and above the average for the five years from 2015 to 2019.
In a critical presidential election year when, according to a March Gallup poll, crime and violence are the second-highest concern of Americans, some see the FBI’s gross underreporting of violent crime and stealth release of “revised” numbers as a purely political ploy. It will be interesting to see if the Harris-Walz campaign changes its tactic of touting reduced violent crime and attacking the Trump campaign for correctly stating that crime is on the rise or simply ignores the revised number like most in the media have done.
