The FBI’s Quiet Revision of Its 2022 Crime Numbers Adds Fuel to an Argument Between Harris and Trump
Since the beginning of this year’s abbreviated presidential campaign, former President Donald Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris have told different stories about crime trends during the Biden administration. As the Trump campaign tells it, “homicides are skyrocketing,” and violent crime has risen dramatically since Trump left office.
While the first claim is inconsistent with data from multiple sources, the second claim finds support in the National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS), which does not cover homicides but tracks other kinds of violent offenses, whether or not they were reported to police. The Harris campaign, by contrast, prefers the FBI’s numbers, which reflect only reported crimes. Judging from those numbers, Harris says, “Americans are safer now than when we took office.”
The latter narrative took a hit recently when the FBI quietly revised its 2022 numbers, which initially indicated a 2.1 percent drop in violent crime. Economist John R. Lott Jr., president of the Crime Prevention Research Center, found that the revised numbers indicate a 4.5 percent rise in the reported violent crime rate, which you can see in this FBI Excel file. Last month, the FBI estimated a 3 percent drop in reported violent crime between 2022 and 2023, which Lott says would have been half as large but for the change in the 2022 numbers.
Lott says the FBI publicly noted that upward revision only with a vague statement that “the 2022 violent crime rate has been updated.” He and other critics argue that the FBI’s reticence makes it hard to trust the agency’s data: If the FBI’s 2022 “update” changed a decrease into an increase, can we be confident that something similar won’t happen with the 2023 numbers? What about the FBI’s preliminary numbers for 2024, which indicate a 10.3 percent drop in reported violent crime between the first half of this year and the first half of last year?
While it is fair to ask why the FBI did not forthrightly acknowledge or explain its revision to the 2022 numbers, a downward trend beginning last year is consistent, in direction if not magnitude, with the numbers reported by other sources. According to AH Datalytics, which separately tracks data from hundreds of law enforcement agencies, reports of violent crime in that sample fell by 2.6 percent in 2023. Its numbers show a continuing drop this year: The total for the 12 months ending in August 2024 was 3.2 percent lower than the total for the 12 months ending in August 2023.
Last July, the Council on Criminal Justice (CCJ), based on data from a sample of 39 cities, compared crime reports for the first half of 2023 to crime reports for the first half of 2024. It found that reports of homicide, aggravated assault, gun assault, carjacking, robbery, and domestic violence fell by 13 percent, 7 percent, 18 percent, 26 percent, 6 percent, and 2 percent, respectively. The CCJ reported that “most violent crimes are at or below levels seen in 2019, the year prior to the onset of the COVID pandemic and racial justice protests of 2020.”
The picture is clearest with homicide, the most serious violent crime and the one that is hardest to miss. In addition to the 13 percent drop reported by the CCJ for January through June, a report from the Major Cities Chiefs Association that covered 69 cities indicated a 17.4 percent drop during the same period. AH Datalytics, based on a sample of 277 cities, reports a similar 17.9 percent drop so far this year.
There is no basis, in short, for the Trump campaign’s claim that “homicides are skyrocketing.” And according to the FBI’s number
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