The FBI has quietly revised 2022 crime data to show that violent crimes have increased rather than decreased

Former President Donald Trump faced numerous “fact checks” during the campaign that used FBI statistics to claim that violent crime in America was declining.

However, in recent weeks the office has quietly adjusted its numbers for 2022 – and the new numbers show that crimes overall have actually increased.

The bureau's seemingly secret editing of statistics, first reported by RealClearInvestigations, shows that the raw number of violent crimes – including murders, assaults and rapes – rose from 1,197,930 in 2021 to 1,256,671 in 2022, which corresponds to an increase of 4.9%.

In October 2023, the FBI issued a press release releasing its 2022 national crime data, which stated that “national violent crime decreased by an estimated 1.7% in 2022 compared to 2021 estimates.”

The bureau originally projected that the violent crime rate as a percentage of the U.S. population fell 2.1% in 2022 compared to 2021.

But the FBI's adjustment now suggests that violent crime rates actually increased by about 4.5% over the same period.

The upward revision went unmentioned in the bureau's annual crime news release from September of this year, which announced that violent crime fell about 3% year-over-year in 2023.

The Crime Prevention Research Center first identified the FBI's subtle solution, citing a spreadsheet that broke down the original data.

“I reviewed total violent crime data from 2004 to 2022,” Carl Moody, an economics professor at the College of William & Mary who specializes in crime research, told RealClearInvestigations. “From 2004 to 2015 there were no revisions and from 2016 to 2020 there were small changes of less than one percentage point.

“The tremendous changes in 2021 and 2022, particularly without explanation, make it difficult to trust the FBI data,” Moody added.

In 2021, the bureau appears to have concluded that it overcounted violent crime cases by 55,786 and undercounted violent crime cases by 24,243 in 2022.

The FBI did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

During the September 10 presidential debate, Trump was fact-checked by ABC News anchor David Muir, who noted that “the FBI says violent crime overall is declining in this country.”

Many of the fact-checks of Trump's crime claims rely on FBI data, whose reliability has long been questioned.

In 2021, the FBI transitioned to a new crime data collection system – the National Incident-Based Reporting System (NIBRS) – and discontinued its Summary Reporting System (SRS).

NIBRS contains much more detailed crime information than SRS, but law enforcement reporting rates have fallen as communities appear to have struggled with the transition.

The FBI is missing data from about a fifth of major local agencies, while reporting rates fell below 70% in 2021 for the first time in at least two decades, according to one analysis.

Beyond the transition issues, some experts have raised concerns about the FBI's data collection because it relies too heavily on self-reporting of crimes that routinely go unreported.