When the FBI originally released the “final” crime data for 2022 in September 2023, it reported that the nation’s violent crime rate fell by 2.1%. This quickly became, and remains, a Democratic Party talking point to counter Donald Trump’s claims of soaring crime.
But the FBI has quietly revised those numbers, releasing new data that shows violent crime increased in 2022 by 4.5%. The new data includes thousands more murders, rapes, robberies, and aggravated assaults.
Source: ExtremeComplex
1 Comment
“Quietly revised” seems to be doing some heavy lifting here. Did they go out and promote the original statistics for 2022, was there some big campaign by the FBI that they didn’t do for the revision? Dropping that line in there about quietly revising the numbers kind of makes this headline feel like propaganda.
Edit: Here’s the actual text of what the FBI released today:
FBI Releases 2022 Crime in the Nation Statistics
The FBI released detailed data on over 11 million criminal offenses reported to the Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR) Program, largely through the National Incident-Based Reporting System (NIBRS) and the Summary Reporting System (SRS).
In December 2015, the CJIS Advisory Policy Board (APB) endorsed the NIBRS transition and the FBI Director approved in February 2016. The FBI announced to law enforcement agencies it would transition to the more comprehensive NIBRS collection. Last year, the data was exclusively collected via NIBRS. Both the NIBRS, 2021 and Crime in the United States (CIUS), 2021 releases were based solely on NIBRS submissions. While in the transition period to NIBRS, the UCR Program published a limited release of the traditional CIUS, 2021, along with a trend study comparing 2020 and 2021 crime data using a selection of the new NIBRS estimation data.
For the 2022 data year, to provide nationally representative data, the FBI accepted NIBRS data and SRS data submissions from agencies. NIBRS data was submitted by 13,293 law enforcement agencies whose jurisdictions covered more than 256 million United States inhabitants. SRS data was accepted from 2,431 non-transitioned agencies representing 55,441,278 inhabitants. These agencies added an additional 16.6% population coverage, bringing the total national population coverage for Crime in the Nation, 2022 to 93.5%.
The data of Crime in the Nation, 2022 were released via several reports: Crime in the United States (CIUS), 2022; NIBRS, 2022; NIBRS Estimates, 2022; Hate Crime Statistics, 2022; Law Enforcement Officers Killed and Assaulted (LEOKA), 2022: Officers Assaulted; and the UCR Summary of Crime in the Nation, 2022. Of the 18,884 state, county, city, university and college, and tribal agencies eligible to participate in the UCR Program, 15,724 agencies submitted data in 2022.
The FBI’s crime statistics estimates for 2022 show that national violent crime decreased an estimated 1.7% in 2022 compared to 2021 estimates:
Murder and non-negligent manslaughter recorded a 2022 estimated nationwide decrease of 6.1% compared to the previous year.
In 2022, the estimated number of offenses in the revised rape category saw an estimated 5.4% decrease.
Aggravated assault in 2022 decreased an estimated 1.1% in 2022.
Robbery showed an estimated increase of 1.3% nationally.