Dr. John Lott has a brand new op-ed piece at New York Publish.
This week President Biden as soon as once more took a victory lap on crime, trumpeting preliminary FBI information on developments in 2024.
“Communities throughout our nation are safer now than once I took workplace,” he bragged in an official assertion.
But, with crime a central subject on this yr’s election, he and the mainstream media have rigorously ignored proof that the FBI could also be fudging its numbers — very like the best way the Bureau of Labor Statistics massively overestimated the variety of jobs created in the course of the Biden-Harris administration.
Final month, new FBI information confirmed that reported severe violent crime (homicide, rape, theft, and aggravated assault) fell by 3.5% in 2023.
However on the identical time — and rather more quietly — the FBI revised its earlier information for 2022, turning a reported lower right into a worrisome enhance in violent crime.
Final yr, the media trumpeted the FBI’s declare that reported violent crime had fallen in 2022 by 2.1%.
However now the FBI admits that violent crime rose in 2022 as an alternative, by 4.5% — off by 6.6 proportion factors.
These up to date numbers resulted in a internet enhance in 2022 over 2021 of 80,029 violent crimes: 1,699 murders, 7,780 rapes, 33,459 robberies and 37,091 aggravated assaults.
It’s a regarding change concerning a extremely politicized matter. A Gallup ballot discovered in March that “crime and violence” was Individuals’ second largest concern, after inflation.
For a few years now, the mainstream media has been operating headlines equivalent to this from NBC Information: “Most individuals suppose the U.S. crime price is rising. They’re unsuitable.”
USA As we speak’s tackle the 2023 FBI crime information was typical: “Violent crime dropped for second straight yr in 2023, together with homicide and rape.”
But don’t anticipate the media to let individuals know that every one the headlines over the past yr had been unsuitable — or that 2022’s enhance was higher than the reported 2023 drop.
Maybe the FBI’s latest numbers gained’t be revised upward subsequent yr, after the election has safely handed.
However even when we take them at face worth, it’s essential to tell apart reported crime from complete crime.
We have now recognized for many years that the majority crimes aren’t reported to the police. That’s why the US Division of Justice supplies a measure of complete crime, which incorporates each reported and unreported crime.
And the outcomes of the Division of Justice’s Bureau of Justice Statistics 2023 Nationwide Crime Victimization Survey, launched in mid-September, inform a really totally different story.
Since victims don’t report most crimes, the NCVS interviews 240,000 individuals every year about their private experiences.
As an alternative of the FBI’s 3.5% drop in severe violent crime, the NCVS discovered a 4.1% enhance in violent crime victimization from 2022 to 2023.
Whereas the FBI claims that severe violent crime has fallen by 5.8% since Biden took workplace, the NCVS numbers present that complete violent crime has risen by an unimaginable 55.4%. Rapes had been up by 42%, theft by 63%, and aggravated assault by 55% throughout his time period.
The will increase proven by the NCVS in the course of the Biden-Harris administration are by far the biggest proportion will increase over every other three-year interval, greater than doubling the earlier file.
we examine 2023 charges with 2019’s pre-COVID violent crime charges, the FBI’s new information present just about no enchancment — only a 0.2% drop — whereas the NCVS exhibits a 19% enhance in that point interval.
A lot has been product of the latest decline in homicide charges. However whereas homicide charges fell by 16.2% from 2020 to 2023, they nonetheless exceed pre-COVID ranges by a big 9.6%.
The mainstream media’s remedy of those statistics has been shameful.
Even after the NCVS information was launched and former President Donald Trump mentioned them in a press convention, most shops solely famous the brand new numbers in “truth checks” that sought to dismiss their significance
The underside line: Trump is appropriate that violent crime has elevated considerably in the course of the Biden-Harris administration.
He has additionally been appropriate to level out that many police departments not report their information to the FBI.
In 2023, 21% of departments together with giant cities like New York and Los Angeles, despatched no crime figures to the FBI. One other 24% of police departments solely partially reported crime information in 2022, the final yr obtainable.
The mainstream media refuses to say any information that doesn’t match their narrative.
However Individuals in lots of elements of the nation see the consequences of rising crime day by day, from locked-up merchandise within the native Walgreens to fixed information about assaults within the subway.
We all know that our lives weren’t like this a couple of years in the past.
John R. Lott Jr. is president of the Crime Prevention Analysis Heart. He served as senior adviser for analysis and statistics within the Workplace of Justice Applications and the Workplace of Authorized Coverage on the Justice Division.
John R. Lott, Jr., “First jobs, now crime: Biden’s FBI revises 2022 violence stats for the more serious,” New York Publish, October 5, 2024.
