FBI Updates National Crime States – Shows Significant Jump in Violent Crime

During the entire election season, claims by Republicans that violent crime has gone up under the Biden-Harris administration have been debunked by the FBI report on violent crime, but there was a caveat.

Not all cities had reported their crime data, but that was just corrected, and it turns us the GOP was right, showing a 4.5% increase in crime in 2022.

Debunked

Ever since this election season started, the GOP has been accused of lying about crime data in debates and on news shows.

Every time a Republican noted that violent crime had risen under the Biden-Harris administration, the media would push back, citing the FBI crime stats. The problem, however, is that cities are no longer required to submit data, so the numbers were incomplete as far as that study was concerned.

When the crime data for 2022 was released, it showed a 2.1% decrease in violent crime from the previous year, and that info was used by Democrats to tout Biden, now Harris. In fact, as recently as last month, Biden was touting these numbers, stating, "This year, the homicide and violent crime rates have continued their rapid decline from their peaks during the last administration." He continued, "... 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."

The Numbers Were Wrong

As I noted above, the Democrats' numbers were faulty because the FBI changed data collection requirements, which Republicans knew. But when they called that out, they were also called liars. Now that the data has been corrected, it shows an additional 80,029 violent crimes over the previous year, a 4.5% increase.

John Lott, the founder and president of the Crime Prevention Research Center, explained, "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."

He continued, "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 the final data that came out last month now claims that rather than the 2.1% drop, there was a 4.5% increase in violent crime in 2022. That's a 6.6 percentage point change there.

"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.'"

Trump Pounces on New Numbers

After the new and more accurate data was released, the Trump campaign pounced, just as we expected, Trump campaign spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt stated, "The federal government lied about Biden's cognitive decline, lied about the job numbers, and now we learn they lied about crime numbers too. 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."

The White House responded with nothing but spin, so it is not even worth printing here. They will continue to lie to the American people to push Harris as the next president, but the numbers don't lie. People can see the report for themselves and judge just how truthful Biden and Harris have been with the American people.