In response to former President Donald Trump's oft-repeated claim that violent crime has increased under the Biden-Harris regime, the Harris campaign, Democrats, and the media have loudly countered that FBI statistics show that violent crime has decreased over the past few years.

Except, as it turns out, Trump is correct and his critics are wrong, as they are citing old numbers from the FBI that were quietly updated without public notice to confirm that, yes, crime statistics have gone up over the past couple of years, the Washington Examiner reported.

That revelation, in addition to proving that Trump's claims have been right, calls into question the credibility of the FBI, the veracity of their reported numbers, and the honesty and professionalism of those who cited the incorrect and outdated figures without double-checking them.

FBI stealthily revised crime numbers upward

Researcher John Lott, in a piece for RealClearInvestigations, noted that the FBI initially claimed in a September 2023 report that violent crime in 2022 had fallen by 2.1%, only to then later stealthily revise those numbers upward to reveal that violent crimes in 2022 actually increased by 4.5%.

That is a significant 6.6% swing in the violent crime numbers, but the FBI made no major announcement or even issued a quiet press release about the massive edit, and simply added a footnote to the report that stated without any additional explanation, "The 2022 violent crime rate has been updated for inclusion in CIUS, 2023."

Indeed, Lott pointed out that the only way anybody would ever know about the vastly different numbers is if they downloaded both the original report from September 2023 and the updated version and then painstakingly compared the two side-by-side -- which is exactly what he and his Crime Prevention and Research Center did.

What their efforts revealed is that, rather than falling from 2021 to 2022, as was initially claimed, there were at least 80,029 more reported violent crimes over that span, including nearly 1,700 more murders, nearly 8,000 more rapes, more than 33,000 additional robberies, and more than 37,000 additional aggravated assaults.

This is unheard of

The RCI report asserted that such a substantial change in the FBI's numbers is virtually unheard of, as edits to the numbers in previous years' reports have always been relatively insignificant or had minimal statistical impact on the reported figures.

"I have checked the data on total violent crime from 2004 to 2022," College of William & Mary professor Carl Moody, a crime research specialist, told RCI. "There were no revisions from 2004 to 2015, and from 2016 to 2020, there were small changes of less than one percentage point. The huge changes in 2021 and 2022, especially without an explanation, make it difficult to trust the FBI data."

"With the media using the 2022 FBI data to tell us for a year that crime was falling, it is disappointing that there are no news articles correcting that misimpression," the professor added. "We will have to see whether the FBI later also revises the 2023 numbers."

Survey of actual crime victims tells a different story

Part of the problem here, per Lott's RCI piece, is that the FBI isn't working with complete numbers in the first place and must make estimates in many instances that they then extrapolate from to try and determine what the total numbers for violent crimes might actually be.

That is partly because not all cities and law enforcement agencies report their annual numbers to the FBI, but also because the numbers that are turned over to the FBI only include "reported" crimes, which studies have shown only include about one-third to half of actual criminal acts that have occurred.

Perhaps a better metric for measuring crime, though also admittedly an incomplete picture, is the annual National Crime Victims Survey, the latest of which found a nearly 30% increase in violent crimes from 2022 to 2023, per RCI, and a more than 55% increase since the Biden-Harris regime came to power in 2021.

According to that survey of actual crime victims, and not the partially reported figures to the FBI, since Biden and Harris took office there has been a 42% increase in rapes, 63% increase in robberies, and 55% increase in aggravated assaults -- once again proving that Trump has been correct in his claims about rising crime.