FALSE Crime Statistics
The FBI published its quarterly report on crime figures on June 10. As expected, the left was eager to point out that the Biden administration had decreased crime in the United States.
“Violent crime has decreased in every year of the Biden administration,” said Chris Hayes of MSNBC. The murder rate, according to CNN, “is plunging.” The data was described by Attorney General Merrick Garland as showing a “historic decline in violent crime.”
The left believes that Americans will just swallow these assertions whole.
As a lifelong prosecutor and law-abiding citizen, I applaud any decrease in crime. However, I also feel that there is something “fishy” about the statistics. A deliberate diversion. A kind of “blue herring.” The scent of doubt surrounding Biden’s assertions to have reduced “crime rates” is strong.
This is the reason.
Admittedly, data on crimes is incomplete, but it has never been more so than it has been in the past three years. The FBI receives voluntary reports on crimes from each of the roughly 19,000 state and local law enforcement organizations in the country. These organizations are free to report full data, some data, or erroneous data.
The percentage of people fully enrolled in the FBI’s crime data collection system fell to 60% in 2021. There was a pitiful 69% agency involvement rate in 2022, the most recent statistical year, and there is no reason to believe that agency participation has grown since.
A portion of the problem stems from the FBI’s 2021 mandate that agencies provide more detailed crime statistics, which put agencies under pressure and made police officers statisticians. But this also meant that more comprehensive population center crime data had to be made public, which led to the complete cessation of reporting crime data or the publication of false crime statistics in places like New York, Los Angeles, Philadelphia, San Francisco, and other large police departments.
The humiliation of the crime that occurs in those regions obviously wasn’t worth the effort, despite the millions of federal grant monies those huge police departments receive annually to gather and report their crime statistics.
Citing “crime rates” (crime statistics based on per 100,000 inhabitants) is less than worthless when the biggest cities in our country fail to submit reliable crime data. Data quality determines the quality of statistical analysis. For this reason, the significance of raw figures increases.
Are you beginning to smell it?
Consider Biden’s assertions of lower crime rates to be suspect. Biden claimed responsibility for a 13% drop in the homicide crime rate in 2023 compared to the previous year in his remarks on March 19. Official 2023 crime statistics won’t be available until later this year, but even if the 13% decrease is accurate, it’s crucial to comprehend the statistical background of Biden’s three years in office.
Why is Biden’s DOJ stating that there was an increase in violent crime victims in 2021 and 2022, even though violent crime is supposedly on the decline?
