Federal government data simply can no longer be taken at face value.
I realized this when watching Democrats’ repeated proclamations about jobs numbers during the Obama years only to see those numbers quietly revised the following month, almost always with the revision making touted jobs disappear, rather than quiet corrections representing improvements. Now, it seems crime data has the same partisan infection. All year, we’ve been hearing that violent crime is down under President Joe Biden, but a few weeks ago, the FBI quietly revised its numbers to show a 4.5% increase in 2022, rather than a decrease. Naturally, that makes the 2023 decrease seem even larger, but here’s the key point:
“I have checked the data on total violent crime from 2004 to 2022,” Carl Moody, a professor at the College of William & Mary who specializes in studying crime, told RealClearInvestigations. “There were no revisions from 2004 to 2015, and from 2016 to 2020, there were small changes of less than one percentage point. The huge changes in 2021 and 2022, especially without an explanation, make it difficult to trust the FBI data.”
These numbers are non-transparent estimates, and no explanation for revision is being offered. The most rational conclusion is that bureaucrats are doing their part to “save our democracy” by keeping Democrats in power.