FBI revises 2022 crime stats, admits violent crime rising

The revision came more than a month after erroneous numbers were used to fact-check former President Trump in debate with Vice President Harris.

Washington, DC – The Federal Bureau of Investigation quietly revised its 2022 national crime figures in September, a report by RealClearInvestigations revealed.

The FBI had originally reported a 2.1% decline in violent crime when the 2022 data were released in September 2023. New data added to the bureau’s crime data explorer now indicate a 4.5% increase in 2022. No mention of the revision was made in any public statement or press release, and the discrepancy was only uncovered through an investigation conducted by the Crime Prevention Resource Center, which compared the new data with 2021.

This represents a 6.6% change between the two data sets, the largest revision ever seen for these statistics. It also contradicts the widely-reported drop in the national crime rate last year that was based on the FBI’s original data.

As recently as one month ago, ABC News anchor David Muir used the old data to contradict former President Donald Trump during his live debate with Vice President Kamala Harris when Trump claimed that crime was on the rise. According to the ABC News transcript of the debate:

FORMER PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: …Crime here is up and through the roof. Despite their fraudulent statements that they made. Crime in this country is through the roof. And we have a new form of crime. It's called migrant crime. And it's happening at levels that nobody thought possible.

DAVID MUIR: President Trump, as you know, the FBI says overall violent crime is coming down in this country, but Vice President the...

FORMER PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: [ex]use me, the FBI -- they were defrauding statements. They didn't include the worst cities. They didn't include the cities with the worst crime. It was a fraud. Just like their number of 818,000 jobs that they said they created turned out to be a fraud.

Former President Trump was referring to the Bureau of Labor Statistics revising its own estimates of 2023 job creation, which turned out to be significantly lower than previously projected and reported. 

The changes are significant. Revised data indicate there were 1,699 more murders, 7,780 more rapes, and 37,091 more aggravated assaults than in 2021. Violent crime had already risen significantly after the 2020 COVID lockdowns and street violence, and has yet to return to pre-COVID levels.

The Bureau of Justice Statistics, a separate agency in the Department of Justice from the FBI, keeps a different set of crime statistics collected through the annual National Crime Victimization Survey. This survey found a staggering 29.1% increase in all violent crime in 2022. 

NCVS data also indicate an overall increase in violent crime of 55.4% since President Biden took office, rather than the 5.8% decline claimed by the FBI. Last year, the FBI claims there was a 3.5% drop in violent crime while NCVS found a 4.1% increase. Neither of these measures count the 45% of violent crime and 30% of property crime that go unreported annually.