Crime and data expert John Lott spoke to Fox News Digital regarding how the FBI updated its 2022 violent crime stats to show a 4.5% increase, not a decrease.
The Federal Bureau of Investigation quietly updated its 2022 crime data to show an increase in violent crimes, despite previous data showing violent crimes had fallen that year, which was touted as a victory for the Biden-Harris administration.
“For some reason, the media, they did pick the crime data that they think goes and makes the Democrats look as good as possible. And then even when the crime data that they’ve relied on turns out by the very source of that data to be wrong, none of them fix it,” John Lott, the founder and president of the Crime Prevention Research Center, told Fox News Digital in a Zoom interview this week.
The FBI released its annual crime in the nation data for 2022 last year, which found a 2.1% decrease in violent crimes compared to 2021, Lott explained. The data was lauded by Democrats and the media as part of a turning point for crime woes in the U.S., following the crime wave of 2020, when defund-the-police protests and riots swept the nation and the pandemic’s stay-at-home orders upended daily life.
Now, the data reflects a net increase of 80,029 violent crimes in 2022 over 2021. Lott found that under the umbrella of violent crime, there were an additional 1,699 murders, 7,780 rapes, 33,459 robberies and 37,091 aggravated assaults that year.
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“To give people an idea of the size of the change, when the 2022 data came out in September 2023, they initially reported that violent crime had fallen by 2.1% in 2022.… That’s the final data, supposedly, for 2022. The revision of that final data that came out last month, now claims that rather than the 2.1% drop, that there was actually a 4.5% increase in violent crime that occurred in 2022. That’s a 6.6 percentage point change there,” Lott told Fox News Digital.
“It’s from a drop to an increase. And, you know, the bizarre thing to me is, for a year after the 2022 data was put out, we were having headlines, news articles after news articles saying, ‘Violent crime is falling, people mistakenly or erroneously believe that it’s increasing.’ And, you know, and they were relying on this data. But you don’t see any corrections in the news. Saying, ‘Oops, the FBI data that we relied on was wrong, that rather than a drop, there was actually an increase that had occurred,’” he added.
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President Biden and the Harris campaign have touted that violent crimes had fallen under their leadership, with Biden calling the reported violent crime drops “historic” while citing the FBI’s most recent data.
“This year, the homicide 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 when I took office.”
“Americans are safer today than when Vice President Harris and I took office. We can’t stop now,” Biden added in a separate White House statement in August touting crime data from an independent organization of police chiefs across the nation.
The Trump campaign, when asked about the revised data, took a victory lap, saying, “President Trump was right…. AGAIN!”
“The federal government lied about Biden’s cognitive decline, lied about the job numbers, and now we learn they lied about crime numbers too,” Trump campaign spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt told Fox News Digital. “Kamala Harris must admit she’s wrong and address how she plans to bring down the rising crime crisis. Every mainstream media reporter who was quick to correct President Trump must cover this new revelation if they have any shred of integrity left.”
Trump has repeatedly said on the campaign trail that “crime in this country is through the roof” under the Biden-Harris administration, despite the previous figures promoted by the FBI showing violent crime was allegedly on a downward trend.
When asked about the revision, the White House argued that following the passage of the American Rescue Plan in 2021 under the Biden-Harris administration, violent crime is “at a near 50-year low.”
“Under the previous administration, our country saw the biggest increase in murder rates on record. President Biden and Vice President Harris immediately got to work to turn it around and passed the American Rescue Plan, which led to the largest ever federal investment in public safety. As a result, violent crime is at a near 50-year low, and is continuing to decline this year according independent data from police chiefs in the nation’s largest cities,” White House spokesperson Robyn Patterson told Fox News Digital on Wednesday.
An administration official added in a comment to Fox Digital that the “FBI often adjusts crime estimates as more data is reported.”
“During the prior administration, the FBI upwardly adjusted crime data during its last three years: in 2018, 2019, and 2020. These adjustments are standard practice,” the official continued before citing an article on the data this week. “Real Clear Investigations fails to mention that, in 2021, there was a sharp decline in the number of agencies participating in FBI data collection because the FBI temporarily disallowed an earlier collection method. The FBI switched back to its prior method in 2022.”
Lott explained 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, they had some changes for a few of the previous years, but they were very small. The changes for 2021 and 2022 were very large. You know, I looked through the press release that the FBI had put out, there was no mention of them having changed the data for earlier years. And surely no mention of the large change that had occurred. I looked through the Uniform Crime Report summary report that the FBI puts out, and there was no mention of the size of the change. There’s one footnote there that vaguely mentions that they had updated the data for 2022. No mention about updating it for 2021 or any other time,” he said, calling the discovery “shocking.”
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The data update is akin 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 of this year, Lott said.
Lott authored an article on the data for Real Clear Investigations this week, which argued the updates to 2022 stats open the door to questioning if the 2023 stats showing an estimated 3% drop in violent crimes compared to 2022 are legitimate.
“Without the increase, the drop in violent crime in 2023 would have been less than half as large — only 1.6% instead of the reported drop of 3.5%,” Lott wrote.
While FBI data has shown alleged drops in violent crimes in recent years, other government data sets have shown crime has increased in the last few years.
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Crimes such as rape or sexual assault, aggravated assault and robbery increased from 2020 to 2023, the Department of Justice’s Bureau of Justice Statistics revealed last month as part of its National Crime Victimization Survey. Across the board, the survey found total instances of reported violent crimes increased from 5.6 per 1,000 individuals aged 12 and over in 2020, when Trump was still in office, to 8.7 per 1,000 in 2023.
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Lott, who also served as a senior adviser for research and statistics at the DOJ’s Office of Justice Programs, authored an op-ed for Real Clear Politics last month and detailed that the DOJ survey found that total violent crimes are 55.4% higher in 2023 than in 2020, the end of Trump’s tenure, while rape crimes increased by 42%, robbery by 63% and aggravated assault by 55%. The DOJ survey does not include surveys on murder, but that category is almost always reported to police departments, and subsequently to the FBI, he noted, and makes up about 1% of the U.S.’ total violent crimes.
Fox News Digital reached out to the FBI and Harris campaign regarding the 2022 data but did not immediately receive replies.
