OPINION: This article may contain commentary which reflects the author’s opinion.
Newly released crime statistics by the FBI have once again proven former President Donald Trump correct after he was criticized as being wrong for claiming crime rates had risen under the Biden-Harris administration during his debate with the vice president.
During the Sept. 10 debate, Trump said, “Crime is down all over the world, except here. Crime here is up and through the roof, despite their fraudulent statements that they made. And we have a new form of crime. It’s called migrant crime, and it’s happening at levels that nobody thought possible.”
Democratic nominee Kamala Harris shook her head “no” throughout Trump’s statement. And NBC News moderator and nightly anchor David Muir backed the VP, saying, “President Trump, as you know, the FBI says overall violent crime is actually coming down in this country.”
Trump then protested, “Excuse me the FBI defrauded. They were defrauding statements. They didn’t include the worst cities.”
Turns out the former president was right.
In a piece for Real Clear Investigations on Wednesday, John Lott—president of the Crime Prevention Research Center and former senior adviser for research and statistics at the Justice Department—documented how the FBI’s recently released revised data for 2022 indicated a 4.5 percent increase in violent crime compared to the previous year.
In fact, there were 80,029 more violent crimes in 2022 compared to 2021, which included 1,699 additional murders, 7,780 more rapes, 33,459 more robberies, and 37,091 more aggravated assaults, the FBI’s stats show.
“It’s been over three weeks since the FBI released the revised data. The Bureau’s lack of acknowledgment or explanation about the significant change concerns researchers,” Lott wrote.
Carl Moody, a professor at the College of William & Mary who specializes in crime studies, told Real Clear Investigations that he reviewed crime data from 2004 to 2022 and found no such drastic changes.
“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,” he said.
David Mustard, a professor at the University of Georgia who researches extensively on crime, told the outlet, “This FBI report is stunning because it now doesn’t state that violent crime in 2022 was much higher than it had previously reported, nor does it explain why the new rate is so much higher, and it issued no press release about this large revision.”
When fact-checking Trump, Muir was likely referencing the FBI’s 2024 quarterly report, which indicates that violent crime decreased by 15.2 percent compared to the first three months of 2023. However, this figure may be misleading, according to the New York Post.
“The FBI statistics included murder, rape, robbery and aggravated assault under violent crimes — but was far from a complete picture, as only 72% of the law enforcement population participated in the report,” the Post added.
In May, the Coalition for Law and Order published a study revealing that the FBI estimated crime data for major cities such as New York, Los Angeles, Phoenix, and Pittsburgh due to their non-participation in the survey.
