The FBI has quietly changed its crime data reporting to reflect that violent crime went up, vindicating Donald Trump and undercutting a narrative pushed by Democrats and media "fact checkers" about public safety.

The new official data shows that violent crime increased by 4.5% from 2021 to 2022, whereas previously, the FBI boasted that crime had gone down 2.1%.

FBI quietly changes data

The Kamala Harris campaign and its surrogates - including many left-leaning media outlets - have repeatedly said crime is going down, citing the FBI's misleading data.

"Americans are safer today than when Vice President Harris and I took office. We can’t stop now," Joe Biden said in August.

The FBI's press release in September did not acknowledge the new figures, which reflect a net increase of 80,029 violent crimes in 2022, including 1,699 murders, 7,780 rapes.

John Lott of the Crime Prevention Center reported on the new figures, noting the unprecedented size of the data correction. The FBI was off by 6.6 percentage points.

ABC "fact checked" Trump using FBI statistics during September's presidential debate. Moderator David Muir interrupted Trump to assert that crime has decreased as Trump pushed back on the FBI's "fraudulent" claims.

"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," Trump said.

Trump claims vindication

Given the public importance of this issue, one would expect the FBI to make a vigorous effort to correct the record.

The FBI's stealthy decision to stealthily change the numbers only reinforces the perception that the agency has a partisan bias.

The fudged data is part of a broader trend of Democrats using unreliable government data to push talking points.

Earlier this year, the federal government admitted that reports of year-over-year job growth had been overestimated by 818,000 jobs.

"The federal government lied about Biden’s cognitive decline, lied about the job numbers, and now we learn they lied about crime numbers too," Trump campaign spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt told Fox News Digital. "Kamala Harris must admit she’s wrong and address how she plans to bring down the rising crime crisis. Every mainstream media reporter who was quick to correct President Trump must cover this new revelation if they have any shred of integrity left."