FBI Caught Gaslighting the Public With Bogus Crime Stats
Oops, the FBI has been caught surreptitiously “revising” their crime statistics. The FBI’s stealth edits of their 2022 crime statistics showed that violent crime had not dropped by 2.1 percent as they originally claimed, but actually increased by 4.5 percent. That is a net increase in violent crimes of 6.6 percent from the figures the FBI originally reported. That is quite a large difference.
The public would never have known about the dramatic increase in violent crimes but for the diligence of RealClearInvestigations (RCI). Their researchers noticed a seemingly innocuous note on the FBI website, “The 2022 violent crime rate has been updated for inclusion in CIUS, 2023.” Intrigued, the investigators went to the website to learn what the updated FBI stats revealed. They were startled when they compared the new data with the statistics the FBI had reported earlier.
The revised numbers showed 80,029 more violent crimes than what was previously reported. The new dataset showed thousands more rapes, murders, robberies, and aggravated assaults than the FBI had reported:
- 7,780 more rapes
- 1,699 more murders
- 33,459 more robberies
- 37,091 aggravated assaults
- 54,216 more motor vehicle thefts
How could the FBI miss 1,699 murders? Bodies in the morgue are hard to miss, but the FBI managed to overlook them. It boggles the mind that over 80,000 violent crimes were missed by the nation’s “premier law enforcement agency.” (READ MORE: Lies, Damned Lies, and Crime Statistics)
Former FBI officials are chagrined at the manipulation of crime data. Former Assistant FBI Director Mark Morgan wrote in the Washington Examiner that the FBI’s earlier report was “unreliable at best and deceptive at worst.”
Carl Moody, an economics professor at the College of William and Mary who studies crime, said, “The huge changes in 2021 and 2022, especially without an explanation, make it difficult to trust the FBI data.” No kidding!
You would think a revision showing such a large increase in violent crime would be a major story. Yet, the FBI made no public announcement of this dramatic escalation in violent crimes. In fact, the FBI’s September press release touting a downward trend in violent crime is still on their website — uncorrected.
This fits a troubling pattern. Democrats claim that crime is falling in the United States, and they cite FBI statistics to back up their argument. Democrats use the erroneous original FBI report to accuse Republicans of spreading “disinformation” when they claim violent crime is rising.
This could almost be considered election interference since the FBI released this false report in the middle of a presidential campaign, thereby providing the Democrats with the headlines they wanted. USA Today, reporting on the now debunked statistics, wrote, “Violent crime dropped for third straight year in 2023, including murder and rape.” And Vox trumpeted, “The crime wave is over, but Republicans can’t let go.”
Appearing almost intentional, the now disproven FBI figures were used against Trump during the Presidential Debate. ABC’s David Muir interrupted Trump and challenged his statement that crime was “through the roof.” Muir butted in with, “FBI data shows that overall violent crime rates have actually been declining in recent years.”
Because of the RCI investigation, we now know that David Muir was wrong, and Trump was right. Yet ABC has not acknowledged their error nor apologized for misleading their viewers.
For several years, Leftists have been telling us that violent crime is decreasing, despite the mayhem we see on the news each night. According to the government, we can’t trust what we see. In the words of comedian Chico Marx, “Who you gonna believe, me or your lying eyes?”
Our “lying eyes” are seeing gangs of looters running into stores, smashing display cases, grabbing expensive items, and then racing off into waiting cars. We see immigrants beating and kicking police officers on the street, violent criminals set free with no bail who go on to commit more crimes, the National Guard deployed to protect passengers on New York subways, South American gangs taking over apartment buildings and terrorizing residents in Colorado and Texas, and young women raped and murdered by criminal illegal immigrants — immigrants the Biden–Harris administration allowed into our country.
But the Democrats and their media friends tell us we are mistaken. That crime is not on the rise, despite what we see.
Other agencies are not innocent of gaslighting the American public either. The bureaucrats at the Department of Labor have been using the same revisionist two-step reporting as the FBI. They have reported large increases in job creation only to later quietly revise those numbers downward.
Similar to the FBI’s crime statistics, the Department of Labor’s adjustments are huge. USA Today reported, “The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics on Wednesday revised down its estimate of total employment in March 2024 by 818,000, the largest such downgrade in 15 years. That effectively means there were 818,000 fewer job gains than first believed from April 2023 through March 2024.” So, the Department of Labor misled the public into thinking that the U.S. was doing much better economically than it really was.
And this is not a onetime occurrence. Virtually every job report in the last two years overestimated the number of jobs created, only to later adjust them downward. In other words, the initial reports almost always overstate the number of jobs — garnering favorable headlines — but later, with no fanfare, the Department of Labor adjusts them downward. Isn’t it amazing that 85 percent of the time the errors work in favor of the current administration?
They are gaslighting us! Gaslighting is an insidious psychological manipulation in which malefactors work to deceive someone and force them to question their sanity and memory. It is very troubling that our own government is the one employing such tactics to make us doubt what we see and experience. Don’t fall for their underhanded schemes. Trust your own eyes and ears.
Russian author and Soviet dissident Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s observations on similar tactics employed by communist Russia are applicable here:
We know that they are lying, they know that they are lying, they even know that we know they are lying, we also know that they know we know they are lying too, they of course know that we certainly know they know we know they are lying too as well, but they are still lying. In our country, the lie has become not just moral category, but the pillar industry of this country.
Folks, the Democrats and the FBI obviously think we are stupid. I think they have miscalculated and we can prove them wrong on November 5.
Pat Nolan is Director Emeritus of the Nolan Center on Justice at the CPAC Foundation.
READ MORE from Pat Nolan:
Will Democrats Finally Address the Mental Health Crisis?
Reclaiming Our Cities From Mayhem
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