FBI quietly updates crime data, showing sharp rise in violence under Biden-Harris administration: ‘Shocking’

The Federal Bureau of Investigation quietly updated its 2022 crime data, showing an increase in violent crime, even though previous data showed violent crime fell this year, touted as a victory for the Biden-Harris administration.

“For some reason the media has chosen the crime data that they believe will make the Democrats look as good as possible. And even if the crime data they relied on came from the exact source of that data. “To be wrong, none of them can fix the problem,” said Lott, the founder and president of the Crime Prevention Research Center , in a Zoom interview on Fox News Digital this week.

The FBI released its annual crime data for 2022 last year, which showed a 2.1% decrease in violent crime compared to 2021, Lott said. The data has been praised by Democrats and the media as part of a turning point in the U.S. crime problem after the crime wave of 2020, when protests and unrest over defunding the police swept the country and curfews imposed because of the pandemic upended everyday life placed.

Now the data reflects a net increase of 80,029 violent crimes in 2022 compared to 2021. Lott noted that under the violent crime umbrella there were an additional 1,699 murders, 7,780 rapes, 33,459 robberies and 37,091 aggravated assaults this year.

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“To give people an idea of ​​the magnitude of the change, when the 2022 data was released in September 2023, it was initially reported that violent crime fell 2.1% in 2022. … This is supposedly the final data for 2022. The revision “The final data released last month now claims that instead of the 2.1% decline, there was actually a 4.5% increase in violent crime in 2022 . That’s a change of 6.6 percentage points,” Lott told Fox News Digital .

“It goes from a decline to an increase. And, you know, the strange thing to me is that a year after the 2022 data was released, we had headlines and news article after news article saying, “Violent crime is going down, folks.” falsely or mistakenly believe that it is increases.’ And, you know, and they relied on that data, but you don’t see corrections in the news: “Oops, the FBI data we relied on was wrong, there was actually a decline.” “That increase that has taken place,” he added.

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President Biden and the Harris campaign have touted that violent crime has declined under their leadership, with Biden calling the reported drop in violent crime “historic” while citing the latest FBI data.

“This year, murder and violent crime rates have continued their rapid decline from their peaks during the last administration,” Biden said in an official White House statement late last month. “…Communities across our country are safer now than they were when I took office.”

“Americans are safer today than they were when Vice President Harris and I took office. We cannot stop now,” Biden added in a separate White House statement in August, citing crime data from an independent organization Police chiefs across the country.

Former President Trump gestures at a campaign rally at Findlay Toyota Arena on Sunday, Oct. 13, 2024, in Prescott Valley, Arizona. (AP Photo/Evan Vucci)

When asked about the revised data, the Trump campaign took a victory lap and said, “President Trump was right… AGAIN!”

“The federal government lied about Biden’s cognitive decline, lied about employment numbers, and now we’re learning they lied about crime numbers too,” Trump campaign spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt told Fox News Digital. “Kamala Harris needs to admit she’s wrong and talk about how she plans to curb the growing crime crisis. Every mainstream media reporter who quickly corrected President Trump needs to report on this new revelation if they have any integrity left.”

Trump has repeatedly said on the campaign trail that “crime in this country is rising rapidly” under the Biden-Harris administration, even though previous FBI figures showed violent crime was reportedly declining.

When asked about the revision, the White House argued that after the passage of the American Rescue Plan in 2021 under the Biden-Harris administration, violent crime is “near a 50-year low.”

“Under the previous administration, our country experienced its largest ever increase in murder rates. President Biden and Vice President Harris immediately went to work to turn the situation around, passing the American Rescue Plan, which resulted in the largest-ever federal investment in public safety.” As a result, violent crime is at a nearly 50-year high. Low and continuing to decline this year, according to independent data from police chiefs in the nation’s largest cities,” White House spokeswoman Robyn Patterson told Fox News Digital on Wednesday.

An administration official added in comments to Fox Digital that “the FBI often adjusts crime estimates as more data is reported.”

“During the previous administration, the FBI adjusted crime data upward for the past three years: 2018, 2019 and 2020. These adjustments are common practice,” the official continued, before citing an article on the data this week. “Real Clear Investigations does not mention that there was a sharp decline in the number of agencies involved in FBI data collection in 2021 because the FBI temporarily banned a previous collection method. The FBI switched back to its previous method in 2022.”

Lott said he noticed the quiet update when the FBI released its 2023 crime data set last month, adding: “It was pretty easy to see that things had changed.”

“For 2022 and 2021 in particular, there were some changes compared to some of the previous years, but they were very small. The changes for 2021 and 2022 were very big. You know, I looked at the press release that the FBI put out. There was no indication that they had changed the dates for previous years, and certainly no indication of the major change that had taken place. “There’s a footnote there , which vaguely mentions that the 2022 data has been updated. There is no mention of them being updated for 2021 or any other time,” he said, calling the discovery “shocking.”

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The data update is similar to when the Bureau of Labor Statistics overestimated the number of jobs created in the U.S. by 818,000 between March 2023 and March 2024, Lott said.

NYPD arrives at a crime scene near Gracie Mansion in Manhattan on July 26, 2024. (Kyle Mazza/Anadolu via Getty Images)

Lott wrote an article about the data for Real Clear Investigations this week in which he argued that the updates to the 2022 statistics open the door to questioning whether the 2023 statistics, which show an estimated 3% decline in violent crime in the Comparison to 2022 shows that they are legitimate.

“Without the increase, the decline in violent crime in 2023 would have been less than half as large – just 1.6% instead of the reported 3.5% decline,” Lott wrote.

While FBI data shows a purported decline in violent crime in recent years, other government data sets show crime has increased in recent years.

Biden-Harris administrator says crime is down, but independent data shows violent crime is increasing in 66 cities

The seal of the Federal Bureau of Investigation in front of its headquarters in Washington, DC, on August 15, 2022. (Mandel Ngan/AFP via Getty Images)

According to the Justice Department, crimes such as rape or sexual assault, aggravated assault and robbery increased from 2020 to 2023 Office of Justice Statistics was released last month as part of the National Crime Victimization Survey. More broadly, the survey found that the total number of violent crimes reported rose from 5.6 per 1,000 people ages 12 and older in 2020, when Trump was still in office, to 8.7 per 1,000 in 2023.

The public safety group notes that the FBI’s violent crime data is higher than originally reported

Lott, who also served as senior adviser for research and statistics at the DOJ’s Office of Justice Programs, wrote an op-ed for Real Clear Politics last month explaining that the DOJ’s survey found that total violent crime would increase by 2023 55.4% higher than In 2020, the end of Trump’s term, rape crimes increased by 42%, robberies by 63% and aggravated assault by 55%. The DOJ survey does not include surveys on homicide, but that category is almost always present reported to police stationsand then to the FBI, he noted, accounting for about 1% of total violent crime in the United States.

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Fox News Digital reached out to the FBI and Harris campaign about 2022 data but did not immediately receive responses.

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