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During the September 10 presidential debate, Trump was fact-checked by ABC News moderator David Muir, who noted that the “FBI says overall violent crime is coming down in this country.” In 2021, the FBI moved to a new system of collecting crime data — the National Incident-Based Reporting System (NIBRS) and retired its Summary Reporting System (SRS).
When Donald Trump said during the debate that crime incidents increased in the Joe Biden-Kamala Harris administration, he was fact-checked. MAGA supporters Wednesday said the FBI quietly adjusted its 2022 figures in recent weeks -- after the debate and the new numbers show Trump was right.
First reported by RealClearInvestigations (RCI), the new numbers show that the raw number of violent crime incidents — including murders, assaults and rapes — rose to 1,256,671 in 2022 from 1,197,930 in 2021, an increase of 4.9 per cent.
In October of 2023, the FBI put out a press release unveiling its national crime data for 2022, which found that “national violent crime decreased an estimated 1.7 per cent in 2022 compared to 2021 estimates.”
“I have checked the data on total violent crime from 2004 to 2022,” College of William & Mary economics professor Carl Moody, who specializes in studying crime, told RealClearInvestigations. “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
,” Moody added.
Elon Musk said even the latest
FBI crime data
"massively understates" the problem.
MAGA supporters claimed Donald Trump was right about the crime data in ABC News debate
The FBI’s crime stats revisions reveal how much guesswork is involved in even the “final” numbers often seized on by politicians. The FBI doesn’t simply count reported crimes. Instead, it offers estimates by extrapolating data from police departments that report only partial-year data. The Bureau also makes estimates for cities that report no data. The FBI’s method of generating these estimates changes over time, and it affects the figures they report, RCI said.
