The Biden administration's FBI is defending its changing of crime data.
RealClear Investigations (RCI) reported Wednesday that the FBI "has quietly" revised 2022 crime data to show violent crime increased by 4.5%, which includes thousands more murders, rapes, robberies, and aggravated assaults.
The updated data for 2022 report that there were 80,029 more violent crimes than in 2021.
When it released the "final" crime data for 2022 in September 2023, the FBI reported violent crime rate fell by 2.1%. But based on the updated 2022 data, the drop in violent crime in 2023 is only 1.6% instead of the reported drop of 3.5%, RCI said.
The FBI on Thursday issued a statement regarding the statistics, blaming the initial data on different reporting systems.
"The FBI stands behind each of our Crime in the Nation publications," the bureau said. "In 2022, the estimated violent crime rate decreased 1.7 percent from 2021. The FBI's Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR) Program transitioned from the traditional Summary Reporting System (SRS) to the more comprehensive National Incident-Based Reporting System (NIBRS) for the 2021 data collection year. A significant number of agencies were unable to complete the transition to NIBRS in 2021.
"Due to the lower volume of participation, the FBI was unable to produce the traditional national estimates for 2021. To provide a confident comparison of crime trends across the nation, the UCR Program performed a NIBRS estimation crime trend analysis. The analysis used NIBRS estimation data of violent and property crimes from 2020 and 2021.
"In 2022, the FBI resumed collecting SRS data in addition to NIBRS to present nationally representative data. In order to compile reliable estimates for the yearly trend, the FBI used a statistical sampling of 2021 data to augment the 2021 information collected via NIBRS for the 2022 publication."
The FBI said last month's release of 2023 crime data "was the first phase in the FBI's efforts to provide the public with more timely data."
"The next phase will see a shift to monthly data releases to promote transparency and provide an opportunity for consumers to review data based on more timely crime counts with the understanding that data will be continuously update," the FBI said. "As part of this movement, the FBI has moved towards automation, allowing for past years' estimates to be updated as data are submitted. Therefore, 2021 counts now showing in the 20-year estimation tables reflect only estimates based on the data directly reported to the FBI.
"This explains why the figure appears different than the computed estimation published in the Crime in the Nation, 2022."
Charlie McCarthy ✉
Charlie McCarthy, a writer/editor at Newsmax, has nearly 40 years of experience covering news, sports, and politics.
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