Perspectives
October 18, 2024 | By Dan O’Donnell
Policy Issues

Turns Out the Numbers Do Lie

Dan O’Donnell on this week’s revelation that the FBI very quietly revised numbers showing a decrease in violent crime under the Biden-Harris Administration to a sharp increase.

“Crime is down all over the world except here,” former President Donald Trump declared in one of the more powerful moments of last month’s presidential debate. “Crime here is up and through the roof. Despite the fraudulent statements that [President Biden and Vice President Harris] made, crime in this country is through the roof.”

ABC’s David Muir, serving more as Harris surrogate than debate moderator, couldn’t let this powerful condemnation of her administration stand and interrupted.

“President Trump, as you know, the FBI says overall violent crime is actually coming down in this country,” he said (rather smugly).

“The FBI, they were defrauding statements,” retorted an incredulous Trump. “They didn’t include the worst cities. They didn’t include the cities with the worst crime. It was a fraud. Just like their number of 818,000 jobs that they said they created turned out to be a fraud.”

It turns out he was right on both counts.

When the FBI released its 2022 Uniform Crime Report last September, it noted that America’s violent crime rate had decreased by 2.1% from 2021. For more than a year, Biden, Harris, and their political allies in both Congress and the media crowed about how successful their policies are and how dishonest and demagogic Trump has been on the issue.

This week, however, the FBI very quietly revised those numbers to show that violent crime actually rose by 4.5% in 2022. RealClear Investigations, which discovered the stealth edit, found only what it described as a “cryptic” note on the FBI’s website indicating that “the 2022 violent crime rate has been updated for inclusion in CIUS, 2023”

There was no indication that violent crime had been revised upward so dramatically or any reason whatsoever for this change. It was almost as though the Bureau knew that the numbers it originally published were incorrect but wanted the “crime is down” narrative to take hold throughout the election cycle and posted the truth hoping no one would notice.

That is precisely what the Biden-Harris Department of Labor did with its monthly jobs report for the past year. In August, the Bureau of Labor Statistics announced that 818,000 jobs it had previously reported were created between March 2023 and March 2024 did not actually exist.

Not coincidentally, the original, inflated numbers allowed Biden and Harris to crow about their record on job creation for nearly an entire election cycle. Then, once the narrative was firmly entrenched in the voting public’s consciousness, the true numbers were released to little fanfare and even less media curiosity about how (and, more importantly, why) the Biden-Harris Administration had gotten them so wrong.

Really, though, no explanation is necessary: Both the FBI and Labor Department published clearly erroneous statistics in what sure looks like an effort to prop up a presidential administration whose primary failures just happen to be in the areas of crime prevention and economic stewardship.

These aren’t trivial statistics, either: the FBI’s crime reports, and the Labor Department’s jobs numbers are two of the most critical benchmarks gauging the overall performance of the nation. When even those numbers are so egregiously fudged to present the public with a false sense of the performance of their nation’s leaders, then the public should rightly no longer trust the institutions that publish them.

If those institutions allow themselves to be politically weaponized to defend their favored leaders against (correct) attacks from those whom they perceive to be their enemies, then they cease to function as credible arms of government and instead become arms of the Democratic Party.

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