When Kamala Harris and other Democrats brag that violent crime has gone down substantially during the Biden-Harris administration, and that it should, therefore, be a non-factor in this November’s presidential election, they’re often using faulty FBI statistics that don’t tell the whole story.
The inability to curb violent crime is actually one of Biden and Harris’ biggest failures over the past three and a half years, but you wouldn’t know that from a cursory look at the FBI’s statistics.
One of the problems with the FBI data, according to researcher John Lott, director of the Crime Prevention Research Center (CPRC), is that not all police agencies report crimes to the FBI; in fact, many stopped doing so in 2021 and 2022. This greatly skews the numbers.
According to Lott, prior to 2021, about 97% of police departments around the nation reported their crime data to the FBI; however, in 2021, 37% of police departments didn’t report their data. And in 2022, 31% of police departments, including those in big cities like New York City and Los Angeles, weren’t reporting their data to the FBI. Consequently, crime numbers appear substantially lower than they really are.
With the FBI statistics now being unreliable, the true picture concerning violent crime can better be seen by exploring the National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS). And, as Lott pointed out in a recent analysis, although the violent-crime rate reported to police declined 1.7% between 2021 and 2022, the National Crime Victimization Survey showed that total violent crime—both reported and unreported—actually jumped substantially from 16.5 to 23.5 per thousand during that same period. Additionally, violent crime in 2022 was above the rate of the last year before the pandemic (in 2019) and above the average for the five years from 2015 to 2019.
As Lott also pointed out in a recent interview with America’s 1st Freedom Editor-in-Chief Frank Miniter, far-left district attorneys downgrading a lot of crimes has led to even more problems with the data.
“That is impacting the statistics,” said Lott. “The most common crimes being downgraded are aggravated assaults. They’re being moved down to simple assaults. Aggravated assaults are in the FBI crime reporting data. Simple assaults are not.”
Unfortunately, that’s not the only way that the FBI is playing fast and loose with the facts to give gun-control advocates ammunition to bolster their cause. As Lott told John Stossel in a September 10 report at Stossel TV, FBI statistics about active-shooter incidents completely ignore many cases where good guys with guns stopped bad guys with guns.
In the interview, Lott pointed out how the agency’s data on active-shooter incidents ignores many cases in which armed citizens stopped such attacks before the death toll could get higher.
“They’re simply missing a huge number of cases,” said Lott. “When a civilian tries to stop one of these instances, they’re overwhelmingly successful.”
But media outlets, aided by the FBI’s incomplete data, tend to shy away from reporting on that matter. One good example is the mass murder at the Pulse nightclub in Florida in June 2016.
Just a week after that, there was a similar attack at a nightclub in South Carolina. During that incident, however, an armed citizen took down the murderer before more people could be killed.
“The thing is, it got virtually no news coverage,” said Lott. When Stossel mentioned that 49 people being killed is a bigger news story than three casualties, Lott countered that the South Carolina incident could have been much worse if not for the armed citizen.
“I understand, but the guy still had like 125 rounds of ammunition on him when he was stopped,” said Lott. “You would think at least some of the news coverage would at least mention, ‘Here’s another case that almost turned out to be the same, but it was stopped.’”
Similar coverage—or lack thereof—occurred in an armed-citizen incident shortly after the Parkland school murders.
“Just a few months later in Titusville, Florida, there was an elementary school that was having a big event at a park right next to the school,” said Lott. “It had hundreds of students there. And a man came up and started firing his gun. [But an armed citizen] was able to seriously wound the attacker and stop him before he was able to go and kill anybody.”
While the incident got some local coverage, it was largely ignored by the mainstream media.
On the CPRC website, Lott has a complete list of active-shooter incidents that were stopped by armed citizens, including those ignored by the FBI and, consequently, the media. Lott believes the omissions are mainly due to politics.
“There’s a lot of political views that people let infect their data,” he told Stossel. “I had interactions with the people in the FBI and I had people … tell me, ‘Well, I’m a Democrat,’ as a response. As if somehow that’s how we determine whether or not to fix the data.
“I think the people at the top are more politically motivated than maybe your rank-and-file FBI agent. If they think that it would go against the narrative that they want to … push, then they’ll fight you.”
