Unveiling the Hidden Crime Epidemic: How FBI Reports Deceive Us

During the presidential debate with Vice President Kamala Harris, former President Donald Trump claimed that the FBI’s report of lower violent crime is a “fraud.” His claim has been verified as true based on an examination of the data used for the FBI reports. The problem lies in the fact that thousands of police precincts are not reporting their crime data to the federal agency, leading to incomplete and potentially misleading statistics.

According to Breitbart News, President Joe Biden stated during a speech at Everytown for Gun Safety on June 24, 2024: “You know, the year before I came to the presidency, the murder rate was the highest increase on record. Last year, we saw the largest decrease of murder in the history of (inaudible. Applause.) And those rates are continuing to fall faster than ever. Last year, we also saw one of the lowest rates of all violent crime in nearly 50 years. Murder, rape, aggravated assault, robbery all dropped sharply, along with burglary and property crime.

However, Breitbart News pointed out that Biden did not mention that 2021 and 2022 witnessed a decline in crime reports from police precincts around the country. The Marshall Project explained that in 2020, almost every law enforcement agency was included in the FBI’s database. However, in 2021, the FBI went to a new system for compiling data and would only accept police precinct reports through the new system.

As a result of this change, thousands of police agencies fell through the cracks because they didn’t catch up with the changes on time. Consequently, in 2022, there were far fewer police precincts turning in crime data. The Marshall Project reported in 2023 that “more than 6,000 law enforcement agencies were missing from the FBI’s national crime data last year, representing nearly one-third of the nation’s 18,000 police agencies.

Former President Trump was correct in pointing out the inaccuracy of the lower violent crime numbers. The reports from which those numbers were drawn are incomplete and should not be relied upon as accurate representations of national crime rates.

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