Former President Donald Trump has faced several rounds of “fact-checks” on the campaign trail, many of which cite FBI statistics to claim violent crime has been falling in the U.S. But the FBI has secretly updated its crime statistics for 2022, and they tell a different story: violent crime rose last year.
According to recent updates to FBI crime data (reported by RealClearInvestigations) violent crimes including murders, assaults and rapes increased by 4.9% between 2021 and 2022. Specifically, violent crimes have increased to 1,256,671 in 2022, from 1,197,930 in 2021.
This update lands on the opposite end of the FBI’s previous press release from October 2023, which reported violent crime in 2022 was down 1.7% from the year prior. This recent shift was not made mention in the FBI’s press release from September 2024 predicting a 3 % decline in violent crime for 2023.
It was the Crime Prevention Research Center that first noticed the disparity – noting that the FBI’s numbers for 2021 and 2022 had undergone significant changes. According to Carl Moody, a professor at the College of William and Mary, there have been no substantial changes to crime numbers between 2004 and 2020, but dramatic updates to 2021 and 2022 data have called into question whether the FBI can be trusted.
“In 2021, it appears the FBI overcounted violent crime by 55,786 incidents and undercounted them by 24,243 in 2022,” Moody told RealClearInvestigations. “These unexplained revisions make it difficult to trust the FBI’s data.”
The controversy over the FBI’s crime reporting system dates back to 2021, when the bureau transitioned from the Summary Reporting System (SRS) to the National Incident-Based Reporting System (NIBRS). NIBRS offers more precise crime data, but law enforcement reporting rates have dramatically declined due to the change. In 2021, less than 70 percent of municipal agencies provided crime data – the lowest in more than 20 years.
The underreporting, in combination with the FBI’s use of self-reporting, has raised fears that the true scale of violent crime in the United States is not being properly captured. Trump’s campaign speeches often invoked the growth in violent crime, with fact-checkers citing the FBI’s now updated statistics.
The FBI had not commented on why its data had been revised and did not return calls for comment.
