I have written several articles law enforcement. A list of links have been provided at bottom of this article for your convenience. This article will, however address different aspects on Law Enforcement.

FBI ‘Stealth Edits’ Crime Stats, Obliterates Democrat And Media Talking Point

The FBI has quietly edited the crime statistics for 2022 after initially stating in September of 2023 that crime — particularly violent crime — was down 2.1% overall.

In the months since that number was first released, Democrats and media talking heads have wielded it like a sledgehammer to crush Republican claims that crime is on the rise — but the “stealth edit,” which was somehow not mentioned in a September 2024 press release from the Bureau, undercuts their argument.

Real Clear Politics co-founder and President Tom Bevan shared an analysis of the revision, saying in an X post, “Guess what? Crime isn’t down 2.1%, according to the FBI. They just released a ‘stealth-edit’ update: violent crime is actually up 4.5%.”

Real Clear Investigations (RCI) dug into the issue after seeing a seemingly innocuous statement on the FBI’s website, which read, “The 2022 violent crime rate has been updated for inclusion in CIUS, 2023.”

As RCI noted, there was no indication that the updates included an upward revision of the violent crime data — and the only way that anyone would ever see the change would be to download the current numbers and compare them side by side with the report released in 2023.

According to RCI’s analysis of just such a comparison, overall crime was up 4.5% rather than down 2.1%, as the Bureau had initially reported. That increase translated to 80,029 more violent crimes — 1,699 murders, 7,780 rapes, 33,459 robberies, and 37,091 aggravated assaults — than were reported in 2021.

To complicate matters even further, it appears that similar revisions did not occur in previous years.

Carl Moody, a professor at the College of William & Mary, told RCI, “I have checked the data on total violent crime from 2004 to 2022. 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.”

The revision vindicates Republicans, who have long been claiming that the data was incorrect and that crime was rising — and backs up former President Donald Trump, who was erroneously “fact-checked” on the issue by ABC News debate moderator David Muir.

Bad data from the FBI mislead about crime

The fourth quarter 2023 crime report from the FBI, the federal government’s keeper of crime data, is unreliable at best and deceptive at worst. 

The FBI’s preliminary 2023 data show murder declined by 13.2% across the country and violent crime dropped 5.7% compared to 2022 levels. Various news headlines have reported the FBI’s numbers unquestioningly, claiming murder is “plummeting” and violent crime “declined significantly” to pre-pandemic levels.

But these latest figures warrant skepticism, as we outline in a new report. In fact, violent crime is up substantially from 2019 levels, and last year’s apparent drop is less significant than it appears.

Part of the problem is how police departments report offenses to the FBI. The FBI asked, then demanded, that law enforcement agencies “transition” away from the system they used for decades to a new, more detailed but onerous one. The 2021 mandate to use NIBRS to submit crime data proved a disaster as overstretched departments, especially in large cities, failed to reach compliance and thus did not submit data. 

In 2019, 89% of agencies covering 97% of the population submitted data, but by 2021, that coverage plummeted to less than 63% of departments overseeing just 65% of the population. Chicago, Los Angeles, and New York City all failed to submit crime data. To increase participation, the FBI relaxed the NIBRS requirement in 2022, allowing agencies to report via the legacy system. 

But many other cities, such as St. Louis, which had transitioned to the new method, still struggle to comply and submit partial or faulty data. The FBI compensates by relying more heavily on “estimation,” or informed guesswork, to fill in the gaps and produce aggregated data. 

That method of inferring offense totals is based on similar jurisdictions and past trends but is prone to error since it cannot compensate for local factors or events. For example, comparing Baltimore’s 2015 homicide total to similar cities’ trends would produce a skewed result. Baltimore, beset by riots and a police stand-down, saw murder rise 62% that year. In peer cities, murders rose in Cleveland only 15% and fell in Detroit by 1% and Memphis by 4%. 

And the figures the agencies do report to the FBI do not match the agencies’ publicly reported figures. For Baltimore, the FBI reported 225 murders in 2023, but the city reported 262 — which means the FBI left out 37 murders. In Milwaukee, the police department reported a 7% increase in robberies, but the FBI showed a 13% drop. Nashville’s own data tallied more than 6,900 aggravated assaults in 2023, but the FBI counted only 5,941, leaving almost 1,000 of those offenses “missing.” This trend is consistent across the board: While 2022’s FBI city-level figures track the police’s own data, the 2023 numbers consistently undercount offense totals. Any year-to-year comparison overstates decline. 

Other measures of crime levels undermine, or at least muddle, the veracity of the FBI’s data, which rely on “reported” offenses by victims and law enforcement themselves. The federal government’s own victims’ survey, which attempts to capture the gap between the number of actual offenses and the number reported to police, shows much higher offense rates than the FBI does. Moreover, a rising share of victims are failing to report their victimizations at all. In 2022, only 42% of violent crime victims and 33% of property crime victims bothered to report the crime to police. 

That underreporting reduces the reliability of FBI numbers in measuring actual offense levels. For example, robbery offenses, which constitute roughly 25% of all violent crime by volume compared to 5% for murder, declined 18% between 2019 and 2022, according to the FBI, while the victim’s survey suggests a 30% rise. 

Another complicating factor is underreporting by the police themselves, who might be under pressure to “downcharge” offenses or dissuade the victims from reporting the crime at all. While the prevalence of underreporting by the police is hard to quantify, an investigation found that between 2005 and 2012, the Los Angeles Police Department erased thousands of crimes, mostly violent assaults, by reclassifying them as lesser offenses or not capturing them at all. The fuzzy math artificially reduced the city’s crime rate by 7%. Any such malfeasance, when officials are under immense pressure to show progress in fighting crime, would inject bad data into the FBI’s estimation model, only compounding its errors. 

Our analysis of 40 jurisdictions that both reported data to the FBI and the Major Cities Chiefs Association, which collects data from the largest police departments, shows that homicide declined 10.2% across 40 major cities in 2023 since 2022, but the FBI reported a 12.8% decline in those same jurisdictions. Similarly, the FBI reported a 6.6% decline in violent crime since 2022, but the same cities reported only a 4.5% drop, with the FBI counting 3,200 more violent crimes in 2022 than the MCCA and 2,600 fewer in 2023 — a net discrepancy of almost 5,900 offenses. That gap conveniently results in a more significant drop in crime levels year to year.

In reality, violent crime is up substantially from 2019 levels. In big cities, murder is still elevated — up 23% since 2019 across all 70 cities tracked by the MCCA and up 18% according to a 32-city analysis by the nonprofit organization Council on Criminal Justice. For aggravated assaults, CCJ’s 25-city sample found those up 8%, while the MCCA larger sample of cities reported a 26% increase over the same period. 

To say crime is down is like descending from a tall peak and standing on a high bluff and saying you are closer to the ground — a true but misleading statement. Worse, the FBI’s crime data serve as a poor altimeter to judge how high (or low) crime actually is. 

Are the Reports That “Crime is Plummeting” a Hoax on Americans?

There’s a particular faction of anti-law-and-order (from here on out, let’s just call them what they are: anti-cop) “leaders” who can’t seem to stop gaslighting the American public. For those who keep hearing the term but are still not sure what it is, it refers to the 1944 movie, set in the late 1800s, called, Gaslight. In a nutshell, the movie tells the story of a husband who tries to make his wife believe she is going insane.

He tells other people, “she’s not well” and tries to convince her that her behavior is not normal, that she’s paranoid, that she’s not hearing the knocks in the night that she is indeed hearing, and that she is imagining it when the gas lighting in their house is dimming.

Let’s update the allegory and apply it to the nation as a whole (you know, hypothetically, of course). It would be like Americans going shopping downtown and seeing mobs of people ransacking a drugstore or riding public transit with folks openly smoking meth or shooting heroin or going to a gas station where someone sticks a gun in your face and takes your car.

Yet, even though Americans see all this crime—or are victims of it, when they get home, they click on the news, and leaders of the anti-cop faction and the media barely report these crimes. Insidiously, the anti-coppers and media go further and falsely report that crime rates are not rising but are actually falling. Yeah. That’s gaslighting.

Just look at this quick online search engine check of the topic: “crime dropping hoax.”

Yes, I put “hoax,” yet the left-leaning search engine’s (in this case, Duck-Duck-Go) top returns show the engine is participating in the hoax by returning serious stories about this fake drop in crime and not about the hoax. What follows is just a few results and a statement.

CBS FBI quarterly report shows 15% drop in violent crime compared to last …

CNN Violent crime is down and the US murder rate is plunging, FBI … – CNN

NBC New FBI stats show ‘historic’ declines in violent crime rate, with …

White House Statement from President Biden on Record Decrease in Crime in First …

While this anti-cop faction quickly takes credit for this supposed drop in crime, officers and shrewd civilians say, “Not so fast.” There are many reasons for the statistical drop in crime, but an actual drop in crime is not one of those reasons.

Dr. John Lott, president of the Crime Prevention Research Center (CPRC), published an Op-Ed in the Wall Street Journal titled, “The Media Say Crime Is Going Down. Don’t Believe It: The decline in reported crimes is a function of less reporting, not less crime.”

Not only are news outlets reporting on the fake drop in crime, but they compound the hoax by proactively reporting that “Americans mistakenly believe violent crime is rising” (don’t believe your lying eyes). Talk about gaslighting.

The FBI statistics are flawed, and media is reporting on them as if they’re accurate, and they are the stats the anti-cop faction is relying on. Former NYPD Inspector Paul Mauro said on FOX News a few nights ago, 40 percent of police departments in the U.S. don’t report their crime statistics to the FBI. There are also reports that the FBI’s homicide numbers for NYC are far lower than NYPD’s numbers.

No wonder the crime stats seem to show a fall in crime with so many jurisdictions not reporting their crime stats to the FBI. The Marshall Project reported, “The gap includes the nation’s two largest cities by population, New York City and Los Angeles, as well as most agencies in five of the six most populous states: California, New York, Illinois, Pennsylvania, and Florida.”

As Dr. Lott explained, it’s not about crime decreasing; it’s about reporting crime decreasing. And whether it’s cities not reporting statistics or victims not reporting crimes the results will obviously skew. NYPD

And there is a “perfect storm,” coalescing several reasons for this fake statistical crime decline. Some of these reasons are uncomfortable to address, but communities (and the anti-coppers) must face them.

Aside from statistical flaws, consider these realities that cops and the crime victims they try to serve know only too well.

• When officials don’t allow police to respond to or enforce certain crimes or crimes committed by certain people, victims will stop reporting crimes.
• When prosecutors stop charging and prosecuting criminals, cops may hesitate to enforce laws, and victims will stop reporting crimes.
• When judges routinely dismiss certain cases, reduce or eliminate bail for serious crimes, or hand out lax sentences, cops may hesitate to enforce certain laws, and victims will stop reporting crimes.
• When states and cities pass cop-hating laws that let criminals get away with crimes, cops can’t enforce what should be laws, and people will stop reporting crimes.

So, when you hear stories about a supposed drop in crime in America, think twice, or maybe more.

Resources

dailywire.com, “FBI ‘Stealth Edits’ Crime Stats, Obliterates Democrat And Media Talking Point.” By Virginia Kruta; washingtonexaminer.com, “Bad data from the FBI mislead about crime.” By Mark Morgan and Sean Kennedy; nationalpolice.org, “Are the Reports That “Crime is Plummeting” a Hoax on Americans?” By Steve Pomper;

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