Legacy Media Outlets Are Ignoring The FBI’s Major Crime Data Revision

Multiple legacy media outlets that covered the FBI’s report on violent crime going down in 2022 have ignored the bureau’s major revision, which shows that violent crime increased that year.

In September 2023, the FBI claimed that data showed violent crime decreased by 2.1% in 2022 compared to 2021. A report from RealClearInvestigations (RCI) on Wednesday, however, revealed that the FBI “quietly revised” those numbers to show that violent crime increased by 4.5% in 2022. USA Today, The New York Times, The Washington Post, and the Associated Press covered the FBI’s report last year, but as of Thursday afternoon, none of those legacy outlets have published any reports — or provided any notes on previous stories — after the FBI revised its data to show that violent crime increased.

The FBI also tried to keep the revision under wraps as RCI only “discovered the change through a cryptic reference on the FBI website.”

“But there is no mention that the numbers increased. One only sees the change by downloading the FBI’s new crime data and comparing it to the file released last year,” John R. Lott wrote for RCI.

The FBI’s 2023 report has been used by Democrats and the legacy media to counter former President Donald Trump’s focus on violent crime under the Biden-Harris administration. Trump was even “fact-checked” by ABC News moderator David Muir during his debate against Vice President Kamala Harris when Trump said that violent crime had gone up under his opponent’s watch.

“Crime here is up and through the roof. Despite their fraudulent claims they make, crime in this country is through the roof,” Trump said during the September 10 ABC News debate. “And we have a new form of crime. It’s called migrant crime, and it’s happening at levels that nobody thought possible.”

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Last year, the AP hailed the FBI’s report on violent crime stats as a return to pre-COVID pandemic numbers. The Washington Post article included a quote from a crime analyst who called the report “substantially improved” over the FBI’s 2021 report, claiming the 2022 report added “a level of certainty that we didn’t have” in 2021.

According to the FBI’s revised data, there were 1,699 more murders nationally in 2022 than in 2021. The revised data also showed 7,780 more rapes, 33,459 more robberies, and 37,091 more aggravated assaults. Lott told Fox News on Wednesday that “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,” he added. “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.’”