FBI Quietly Revised 2022 Crime Data to Show Violent Offenses Rose Rather Than Dropped

Former President Donald Trump has been hit with numerous “fact-checks” on the campaign trail that have cited FBI statistics to maintain violent crime is falling in America.

However, the bureau quietly adjusted its figures for 2022 in recent weeks — and the new numbers show that offenses actually ticked up overall.

The apparent stealth edit to the bureau’s statistics, first reported by RealClearInvestigations, shows that the raw number of violent crime incidents — including murders, assaults and rapes — rose to 1,256,671 in 2022 from 1,197,930 in 2021, an increase of 4.9%.

In October of 2023, the FBI put out a press release unveiling its national crime data for 2022, which found that “national violent crime decreased an estimated 1.7% in 2022 compared to 2021 estimates.”

Initially, the bureau projected that the violent crime rate relative to the US population had slipped by 2.1% in 2022 compared to 2021.

But the FBI’s adjustment now suggests that the rate of violent crime actually jumped by about 4.5% over the same period.

The upward revision went unmentioned in the bureau’s annual crime figures press release from September of this year, which announced that violent crime dropped by roughly 3% year-over-year in 2023.

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