First jobs, now crime: Biden’s FBI revises 2022 violence stats for the worse

This week President Biden once again took a victory lap on crime, trumpeting preliminary FBI data on trends in 2024.

“Communities across our country are safer now than when I took office,” he bragged in an official statement.

Yet, with crime a central issue in this year’s election, he and the mainstream media have carefully ignored evidence that the FBI may be fudging its numbers — much like the way the Bureau of Labor Statistics massively overestimated the number of jobs created during the Biden-Harris administration.

Last month, new FBI data showed that reported serious violent crime (murder, rape, robbery, and aggravated assault) fell by 3.5% in 2023. 

But at the same time — and much more quietly — the FBI revised its earlier data for 2022, turning a reported decrease into a worrisome increase in violent crime.

Last year, the media trumpeted the FBI’s claim that reported violent crime had fallen in 2022 by 2.1%. 

But now the FBI admits that violent crime rose in 2022 instead, by 4.5% — off by 6.6 percentage points.

These updated numbers resulted in a net increase in 2022 over 2021 of 80,029 violent crimes: 1,699 murders, 7,780 rapes, 33,459 robberies and 37,091 aggravated assaults.

It’s a concerning change regarding a highly politicized topic. A Gallup poll found in March that “crime and violence” was Americans’ second biggest concern, after inflation. 

For a couple of years now, the mainstream media has been running headlines such as this from NBC News: “Most people think the U.S. crime rate is rising. They’re wrong.” 

USA Today’s take on the 2023 FBI crime data was typical: “Violent crime dropped for second straight year in 2023, including murder and rape.”

Yet don’t expect the media to let people know that all the headlines over the last year were wrong — or that 2022’s increase was greater than the reported 2023 drop.

Perhaps the FBI’s newest numbers won’t be revised upward next year, after the election has safely passed. 

But even if we take them at face value, it’s important to distinguish reported crime from total crime. 

We have known for decades that most crimes aren’t reported to the police. That’s why the US Department of Justice provides a measure of total crime, which includes both reported and unreported crime. 

And the results of the Department of Justice’s Bureau of Justice Statistics 2023 National Crime Victimization Survey, released in mid-September, tell a very different story. 

Since victims don’t report most crimes, the NCVS interviews 240,000 people each year about their personal experiences. 

Instead of the FBI’s 3.5% drop in serious violent crime, the NCVS found a 4.1% increase in violent crime victimization from 2022 to 2023. 

While the FBI claims that serious violent crime has fallen by 5.8% since Biden took office, the NCVS numbers show that total violent crime has risen by an incredible 55.4%. Rapes were up by 42%, robbery by 63%, and aggravated assault by 55% during his term. 

The increases shown by the NCVS during the Biden-Harris administration are by far the largest percentage increases over any other three-year period, more than doubling the previous record.

If we compare 2023 rates with 2019’s pre-COVID violent crime rates, the FBI’s new data show virtually no improvement — just a 0.2% drop — while the NCVS shows a 19% increase in that time period.

Much has been made of the recent decline in murder rates. But while murder rates fell by 16.2% from 2020 to 2023, they still exceed pre-COVID levels by a significant 9.6%.

The mainstream media’s treatment of these statistics has been shameful.

Even after the NCVS data was released and former President Donald Trump discussed them in a press conference, most outlets only noted the new numbers in “fact checks” that sought to dismiss their importance

The bottom line: Trump is correct that violent crime has increased significantly during the Biden-Harris administration.

He has also been correct to point out that many police departments no longer report their data to the FBI. 

In 2023, 21% of departments including large cities like New York and Los Angeles, sent no crime figures to the FBI. Another 24% of police departments only partially reported crime data in 2022, the last year available.

The mainstream media refuses to mention any data that doesn’t fit their narrative. 

But Americans in many parts of the country see the effects of rising crime every day, from locked-up products in the local Walgreens to constant news about assaults in the subway. 

We know that our lives were not like this a few years ago.

John R. Lott Jr. is president of the Crime Prevention Research Center. He served as senior adviser for research and statistics in the Office of Justice Programs and the Office of Legal Policy at the Justice Department.