I & I Editorial BoardReaders of I&I know all about how the Biden-Harris regime has been fudging jobs numbers to make monthly gains look bigger than they really are. Turns out, it’s been doing the same with crime statistics … this time to make it look like violent crime is on the way down.
RealClearInvestigations dug into the FBI’s data and found that the law enforcement agency had been criminally misreporting crime statistics in a way that just happened to help Biden-Harris look like it’s been tough on crime.
Last fall, for example, the FBI reported that violent crime had dropped by 2.1% in 2022. That number was celebrated by Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, and the press, which said it was proof that Donald Trump was lying about a crime wave.
RealClearInvestigations discovered that the FBI had secretly updated its crime statistics, and instead of showing a 2.1% drop in violent crime, there was a 4.5% increase in 2022.
These weren’t minor revisions in the crime numbers.
Where the FBI originally reported 21,288 fewer cases of violent crime in 2022, its revised number shows a 58,741 increase. Instead of a slight drop in the number of burglaries, the new numbers show an increase of nearly 30,000. Every category was revised sharply upward.
RealClearInvestigations quotes Carl Moody, a professor at the College of William & Mary who specializes in studying crime, who says that “the huge changes in 2021 and 2022, especially without an explanation, make it difficult to trust the FBI data.”
This change also let the FBI claim that violent crime dropped 3.5% in 2023 because it was comparing its current crime statistics for 2023 with the secretly revised higher numbers in 2022, once again misleading the public about the true picture of crime in the U.S.,
Kamala Harris bragged about “great progress” and that “we’re not stopping now” and news sites such as USA Today shouted that “Violent crime dropped for third straight year in 2023, including murder and rape.”
But who can trust anything the FBI reports these days? Or any other federal agency?
This is the same kind of numbers game the Biden-Harris’ Bureau of Labor Statistics has been playing to inflate job gains each month. For instance, BLS claimed that in the first seven months of this year, the economy produced 365,000 more new jobs than were actually created. (See: “The Biden-Harris Jobs Con Continues.”)
There were reasons to doubt these “official” numbers all along
In the case of jobs, the number of payroll jobs being “created” was wildly higher than the number of people who, in a separate BLS survey, said they had jobs.
In the case of crime, a separate Bureau of Justice Statistics’ national crime victimization survey showed that the number of victims of violent crime was a staggering 41% higher in 2023 than in 2020. (See: “The Media’s Criminal Misreporting On Crime.”)
The media are either willfully misleading the public to help Democrats keep the White House, or they are just plain stupid. Either way, they continue to let Biden and Harris brag about a phony decline in crime and a phony increase in jobs.
— Written by the I&I Editorial Board
“The media are either willfully misleading the public to help Democrats keep the White House, or they are just plain stupid.” Ah, good ol’ Option B — the “doing journalism while blond” defense. (Why all this stupidity directly benefits Democrats remains a mystery.) The kissing-cousin to Walz’s “I’m a knucklehead!” nolo contendere plea at the VP debate. “The press are so dumb… [How dumb are they?], the press are so dumb it takes ‘em 2-hours to watch 60-Minutes!” Ba-dump-bump!
and the misleading isn’t anything new …. make sure to include the decades of climate change global cooling global warming doomsday tree-hugging end of the planet hand wringing all into question
This is a nebulous argument. Trump is running around screaming that there is a murderous crime wave. Even if we take your statistical revision argument as true and at face value, Trump is still a damned liar and gas-lighter – playing on fears to divide a nation that should be united against him. A 4-6% upward revision does not make a crimewave. The sky is not falling.
And to put it bluntly, every collector of statistics makes revisions after having announced prior findings. There are delays in information, miscommunications and other human and technological errors that AL:WAYS require revision. Your BS to suggest that revisions are nefarious is beyond laughable. Indeed, good journalists often find themselves needing to print retractions and revisions. This does not consist of proof of evil in their hearts. It proves that they have integrity and dedication to announcing true facts. That is something Trump and you have serious problems doing.
If they are simply correcting statistical errors, why is it that the initial data always errs in the same direction?
What a load of bull. Please point to where they first released their numbers and claimed that the data wasn’t complete or will require revision because “every collector of statistics makes revisions after having announced prior findings” We’ll wait…
Steven is a Soros paid troll. Ignore him, her, it whatever. Probably a bot.
The federal government has been weaponized against everyone, including the clueless group-think democrat rabble in order to control all of us. It was obvious this was going on during the manufactured Covid epidemic and the phony Jan 6th scam investigations. Anyone who trusts the federal government about anything is a fool.
Who says there isn’t a Swamp?!!!
As was said in a comment the original stat is always in favor of the Biden Administration.
Every bureaucracy and Swamp agency in this Biden Administration is more concerned with politics than in furthering the task that the agency employees are employed (by taxpayer funds) to do.
As another commentator notes COVID and Jan 6th information has been nothing but mis and disinformation. As I&I points out the Labor Stats has been massaged so that the Biden Administration’s unemployment looks significantly cheerier than it deserves.
The only thing going for the Biden Administration was the increasing number of people working-but now we find out that Biden’s Labor Dept over-reported the number working.
Moreover, Brownstone Institute’s Jeff Tucker reports that according to Brownstone’s economists, we we’ve been in a recession since about March 2024.
Why does Brownstone believe this? Because GDP is a price derived statistic and Brownstone included inflation to diminish and make more accurate the GDP.
Why wasn’t inflation included? Because, apparently, the Economic and Labor Departments of the Biden Administration were more concerned with ideology than with accurately reporting GDP.
So why is it so hard to believe that the Lawfare practiced against President Trump (and hope to God he’s elected President again) by the so-called Justice Department of the Biden Administration such a large leap?
It isn’t. The Swamp is as real, irritating and hysterically irrational as Kamala’s cackle.