The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) quietly revised its national crime data for 2022, showing that violent crime actually increased instead of the decrease initially reported, according to RealClearInvestigations (RCI).
The FBI Uniform Crime Report (UCR) initially showed a slight 2.1% decrease in violent crime from 2021 to 2022, however the revision, which was only briefly mentioned on its website, shows an increase in violent crime of 4.5%, according to RCI. The revision comes after the release of the 2023 UCR data in September, which showed a 3% decrease in national violent crime, according to an FBI press release.
“I have checked the data on total violent crime from 2004 to 2022,” Carl Moody, professor at the College of William & Mary who specializes in crime, told RCI. “There were no revisions from 2004 to 2015, and from 2016 to 2020, there were small changes of less than one percentage point. The huge changes in 2021 and 2022, especially without an explanation, make it difficult to trust the FBI data.”
The change is only discoverable when downloading the new set of data now and comparing it to the old, with the FBI issuing no statement reflecting the change, RCI reported.
“The FBI stands behind each of our Crime in the Nation publications. In 2022, the estimated violent crime rate decreased 1.7 percent from 2021. The FBI’s [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,” the FBI told the Daily Caller News Foundation.
“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,” the FBI statement continued. “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 also added that they aim to automate the updating of past crime data, while also pointing out that the 2021 counts in the 20-year figures are based on estimates from incomplete data.
The post-release change is similar to the revisions the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) does for its jobs numbers, which overestimated the amount of jobs in America in 2023 by an average of 105,000 a month.
“The [FBI’s] processes, such as how it tries to ‘estimate’ unreported figures, has long been a black box, even to the Bureau of Justice Statistics – the Department of Justice’s actual statistical agency,” Jeffrey Anderson, who headed the Bureau of Justice Statistics from 2017 to 2021, told RCI. “We definitely would have highlighted in a press release or a report the 6.6% change recorded for 2022, which moved the numbers from a drop to a rise in violent crime.”
The BJS releases its own measure of crime called the National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS), which reported a rise in violent crime victimizations in 2022, according to the report summary. The NCVS is a national survey that also accounts for unreported crimes, unlike the FBI UCR data, which relies on reported crimes to police departments around the nation.
“With the media using the 2022 FBI data to tell us for a year that crime was falling, it is disappointing that there are no news articles correcting that misimpression,” Moody told RCI. “We will have to see whether the FBI later also revises the 2023 numbers.”
Editor’s Note: This article has been updated to include a statement from the FBI.
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