David Mastio of the Kansas City Star reached out to the FBI’s press office, asking about RealClearInvestigations‘ scoop that the bureau quietly revised the 2022 crime statistics, “releasing new data that shows violent crime increased in 2022 by 4.5 percent. The new data includes thousands more murders, rapes, robberies, and aggravated assaults.” As Mastio notes, in late September, USA Today reported that “violent crime in the United States declined for the third straight year in 2023,” citing those same FBI statistics.
RealClearInvestigations said the FBI did not respond to RCI’s repeated requests for comment . . . which is bad. When someone notices a discrepancy in the released statistics, the bureau can’t just ignore inquiries it finds inconvenient.
The FBI sent Mastio this long and not terribly clarifying response:
The FBI stands behind each of our Crime in the Nation publications. In 2022, the estimated violent crime rate decreased 1.7 percent from 2021. The FBI’s Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR) Program transitioned from the traditional Summary Reporting System (SRS) to the more comprehensive National Incident-Based Reporting System (NIBRS) for the 2021 data collection year. A significant number of agencies were unable to complete the transition to NIBRS in 2021. Due to the lower volume of participation, the FBI was unable to produce the traditional national estimates for 2021. To provide a confident comparison of crime trends across the nation, the UCR Program performed a NIBRS estimation crime trend analysis. The analysis used NIBRS estimation data of violent and property crimes from 2020 and 2021. In 2022, the FBI resumed collecting SRS data in addition to NIBRS to present nationally representative data. In order to compile reliable estimates for the yearly trend, the FBI used a statistical sampling of 2021 data to augment the 2021 information collected via NIBRS for the 2022 publication.
September’s release of Crime in the Nation, 2023, was the first phase in the FBI’s efforts to provide the public with more timely data. The next phase will see a shift to monthly data releases to promote transparency and provide an opportunity for consumers to review data based on more timely crime counts with the understanding that data will be continuously updated. As part of this movement, the FBI has moved towards automation, allowing for past years’ estimates to be updated as data are submitted. Therefore, 2021 counts now showing in the 20-year estimation tables reflect only estimates based on the data directly reported to the FBI. This explains why the figure appears different than the computed estimation published in the Crime in the Nation, 2022.
Mastio concludes, “When bad news is false, agency press people go out of their way to make it crystal clear that reports are definitely not true. When bad news is true, agency press people spew a wall of fog and bury you under an avalanche of distractions or in this case, contradictions.”