OOps, the FBI has been caught covertly ‘reviewing’ their crime statistics. Stealth edits to the FBI’s 2022 crime statistics showed that violent crime was not down 2.1 percent as they initially claimed, but was actually up 4.5 percent. That’s a net increase in violent crime of 6.6 percent over the figures the FBI originally reported. That’s a pretty big difference.
Without the dramatic increase in violent crime, the public would never have known carefulness by RealClearInvestigations (RCI). Their investigators noticed a seemingly innocuous comment on the FBI website: “The 2022 violent crime rate has been updated for inclusion in CIUS, 2023.” Intrigued, the researchers went to the website to see what the updated FBI statistics revealed. They were shocked when they compared the new data to statistics the FBI had previously reported.
The revised figures show that 80,029 more violent crimes have been committed than previously reported. The new data set showed thousands more rapes, murders, robberies and aggravated assaults than the FBI had reported:
- Another 7,780 rapes
- 1,699 more murders
- Another 33,459 robberies
- 37,091 serious assaults
- 54,216 additional motor vehicle thefts
How could the FBI miss 1,699 murders? Bodies in the morgue are hard to miss, but the FBI managed to miss them. It boggles the mind that more than 80,000 violent crimes were missed by the nation’s “main law enforcement agency.” (READ MORE: Lies, damn lies and crime statistics)
Former FBI officials are disappointed with the manipulation of crime data. Former Assistant FBI Director Mark Morgan wrote in the Washington Examiner that the FBI’s earlier report was “unreliable at best and deceptive at worst.”
Carl Moody, a economy professor at the College of William and Mary that studies crime, said“The massive changes in 2021 and 2022, especially without explanation, make it difficult to trust the FBI data.” No joke!
You’d think a review showing such a large increase in violent crime would be a big story. Yet the FBI has not publicly announced this dramatic escalation in violent crime. In fact, it’s the FBI’s September press release Touting a downward trend in violent crime is still on their website – uncorrected.
This fits a disturbing pattern. Democrats claim that crime is declining in the United States, and they cite FBI statistics to support their argument. Democrats are using the flawed original FBI report to accuse Republicans of spreading “disinformation” while claiming violent crime is on the rise.
This could almost be considered election interference, as the FBI released this false report in the middle of a presidential campaign, giving Democrats the headlines they wanted. USA today, reporting on the now debunked statistics, wrote“Violent crime fell for the third year in a row in 2023, including murder and rape.” And Vox trumpets“The crime wave is over, but Republicans can’t let go.”
The now-refuted FBI figures almost appeared to have been deliberately used against Trump during the presidential debate. ABC’s David Muir interrupted Trump and challenged his statement that crime was “through the roof.” Muir interjected: “FBI data shows that overall violent crime rates have actually declined in recent years.”
Because of the RCI investigation, we now know that David Muir was wrong, and Trump was right. Yet ABC has neither acknowledged their mistake nor apologized for misleading their viewers.
People on the left have been telling us for years that violent crime is on the decline, despite the chaos we see on the news every night. According to the government, we cannot trust what we see. In the words of comedian Chico Marx: “Who are you going to believe, me or your lying eyes?”
Seeing our ‘lying eyes’ gangs of looters encounter shopssmashing display cases, grabbing expensive items and then racing into waiting cars. We see immigrants hitting and kicking police officers on the street, violent criminals free with no bail who are going to commit more crimesthe National Guard was deployed to protect passengers New York subwaysSouth American gangs take over apartment buildings and terrorize residents Colorado And Texasand young women raped and murdered by criminal illegal immigrants – immigrants that the Biden-Harris administration allowed into our country.
But the Democrats and their media friends tell us we are wrong. That crime is not increasing, despite what we see.
Other agencies are not innocent of deceiving the American public either. The bureaucrats at the Department of Labor have used the same revisionist two-step reporting as the FBI. They reported big increases in job creation, but later quietly revised those numbers down.
As with the FBI’s crime statistics, the Department of Labor’s adjustments are enormous. USA today reported“The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics on Wednesday revised down its estimate of total employment in March 2024 by 818,000, the largest downward revision in 15 years. This actually means that between April 2023 and March 2024, 818,000 fewer jobs were created than previously assumed.” So the Department of Labor misled the public into thinking that the US was doing much better economically than it actually was.
And this is not a one-time event. Nearly every jobs report over the past two years overestimated the number of jobs created, only to later adjust it downward. In other words, initial reports almost always exaggerate the number of jobs—generating positive headlines—but later, without fanfare, the Department of Labor adjusts them downward. Isn’t it amazing that 85 percent of the time the mistakes work in favor of the current administration?
They are gaslighting us! Gaslighting is an insidious psychological manipulation in which evildoers attempt to trick a person into questioning their sanity and memory. It is deeply disturbing that our own government uses such tactics to make us doubt what we see and experience. Don’t fall for their underhanded plans. Trust your own eyes and ears.
Russian author and Soviet dissident Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s observations about similar tactics employed by communist Russia apply here:
We know that they are lying, they know that they are lying, they even know that we know that they are lying, we also know that they know that we know that they are lying too, of course they know that we are sure that they know that we know that they lie lie too, but they still lie. In our country, the lie has become not just a moral category, but the mainstay industry of this country.
Folks, the Democrats and the FBI clearly think we’re stupid. I think they misjudged and we can prove them wrong on November 5.
Pat Nolan is director emeritus of the Nolan Center on Justice at the CPAC Foundation.
READ MORE from Pat Nolan:
Will Democrats finally address the mental health crisis?
Prisoner rape is no joke
Reclaiming our cities from chaos