Full Measure’s Sharyl Attkisson does a deep dive with Dr. John Lott on problems with the FBI’s crime data. This interview was related to Dr. Lott’s investigative piece at Real Clear Investigations titled “Stealth Edit: FBI Quietly Revises Violent Crime Stats.”
After suffering alarming spikes in violent crime, some cities are now reporting better news. For example in 2023, Washington, D.C. saw a 39% increase in crime and the most murders in 25 years. Now, the capital city is reporting a 35% decrease in violent crime for 2024. The past four years have been filled with debate over the national trends. Some say the government has been manipulating numbers. Today, we dig into the anatomy of how the reporting of crime stats has changed, and whether we’re getting the full truth.
It’s not hard to find signs that crime has surged in some American cities. Yet many in media and politics insisted it’s just a mirage that there’s actually less crime.
In 2023, going into the election year, proof seemed to come in the FBI’s annual crime data.
The statistics showed a 2.1% decrease in violent crime in 2022 under the Biden administration.
President Joe Biden (Feb. 28, 2024): Last year, the United States had one of the lowest rates of all violent crime, of all violent crimes in more than 50 years.
To many, the good news seemed to fly in the face of the reality on the ground.
But when Donald Trump raised the issue in his debate against Kamala Harris, a moderator un-skeptically declared the FBI stats to be the final word.
Former President Donald Trump (Sept. 10, 2024): Crime here is up and through the roof despite their fraudulent statements that they made, crime in this country is through the roof. And we have a new form of crime and it’s called migrant crime. And it’s happening at levels nobody thought possible.
David Muir/Debate moderator: President Trump as you know the FBI says that overall is actually coming down in this country.
Trump: Excuse me they were defrauding statements. They didn’t include the worst cities. They didn’t include the cities with the worst crime. It was a fraud.
Trump may have known something the debate moderator didn’t.
Sharyl: Has there been a big shift in what we count as crimes, and how the FBI collects its statistics?
John Lott: There has been a big change.
John Lott is a crime data analyst and was a senior advisor for Research and Statistics in the Justice Department, which is over the FBI. He says the FBI crime stats shouldn’t be taken alone at face value.
Lott: Starting in 2021, they had a new system for reporting this data to the FBI from police departments around the country. In 2020, 97% of police departments reported data. In 2022, 31% of police departments didn’t report any crime data to the FBI another 24% only partially reported data. So you had less than half of police departments in 2022 and 2021 reporting complete crime data to the FBI. That’s a huge sea change.
Where there are gaps in data, Lott says FBI does attempt to fill in the blanks.
Lott: They try to guess. The question is how good of a job they do in guessing. I don’t think they do a very good job in terms of guessing.
He points to two distinct databases that he says should reflect similar trends but have produced impossibly opposite results: the FBI statistics, and the National Crime Victimization Survey, which tries to capture additional crimes that people don’t officially report.
Lott: And the reason why we have this national crime victimization data is we know most crimes aren’t reported to police. About 40% of violent crimes are reported to police. About 30% of property crimes are reported to police. Before 2020, those numbers tended to go up and down together, the reported and the National Crime Victimization data. Since 2020, they’ve been going in completely opposite directions. So for example, in 2022, while the FBI showed a 2% drop in violent crime, reported violent crime, the National Crime Victimization data showed a 42% increase in violent crime. That’s the largest yearly increase we’ve ever seen in that measure. And that’s going back 50 years.
Other factors that could make the crime rate seem lower than it is are: short staffed police departments with fewer officers to make arrests, and prosecutors not prosecuting some crimes.
Lott: What’s happened is unreported crime has increased. Okay? ‘Cause people say, ‘I’m only gonna report these crimes if I think the guy’s gonna get arrested.’
Sharyl: Based on the numbers you’ve seen. What would you say is the true crime trend in this country, and it may be different for violent crimes and nonviolent crimes, but what do you see in the numbers?
Lott: Well, I think it’s gone up tremendously violent crime during the Biden administration. I think it’s gone up by about 43% since he’s been president. And I think there are two reasons why the media wants to go and and kind of claim that it’s going down. One is just unfortunately, I think probably just to help the Democrats on this. But I think the other thing, and a number of Democrats have made this explicit is they say, “Look, we’ve had many millions of illegals coming into the country and violent crime is falling.” And so they say “it can’t be illegals causing more crime because crime is dropping over this period of time.”
Which brings us to another statistical trick, a flood of studies imply illegal immigrants are more law abiding than U.S. citizens.
The Marshall Project video clip: Our study found that immigrants are less likely to break the law than people born in the U.S.
But the studies often group legal immigrants in with illegal immigrants.
Lott: Now, what I’ve found, I did some work for the county prosecutors in Arizona a few years ago, is on their state prison system, is that you have big differences between legal and illegal immigrants. Legal immigrants seem to commit crimes at very low rates. Their share of the prison population was well below their share of the state population. Illegal immigrants though had a very high rate of crime, particularly very violent crime. Everything from kidnappings to murders compared to the general population that are there. Usually what happens in discussions is they mix the two together and so then they’ll get a rate that could be roughly similar or maybe even slightly below what it is for native born Americans. And I think that’s very misleading to lump those two groups together.
In fact, illegal immigrants have made up a disproportionately high number of prison inmates in America, indicating they commit far more serious crimes.
A decade ago, when illegal immigrants made up about one in thirty of the U.S. population, they accounted for a shocking one in four or five U.S. prison inmates, according to GAO. That included 4.9 million arrests for 7.5 million offenses including allegations of more than a million drug crimes, a half-million assaults, 133,800 sex offenses, 24,200 kidnappings, 33,300 homicide-related offenses, and 1,500 terrorism-related crimes. Nobody has tracked or updated the numbers since.
Meantime, stark evidence of Lott’s claims about crime going up not down under the Biden administration seemed to emerge after that presidential debate
Muir: President Trump as you know the FBI says that overall is actually coming down in this country.
Lott discovered the FBI quietly revised its 2022 figures from a 2.1% drop in violent crime to a 4.5% increase making a total rise of 6.6%. That includes 80,000 violent crimes that had gone uncounted: 33,000 additional robberies, 37,000 extra aggravated assaults, 7,000 more rapes, and 1,700 added murders.
Sharyl: Have crime statistics always been politicized and maybe somewhat manipulated?
Lott: I think it’s gotten a lot worse in the last few years, maybe over the last decade or so. It’s gotten a lot worse. I mean, there’s numbers that come out of the Department of Justice now that I just don’t believe at all.
Sharyl (on-camera): We asked the FBI what accounted for the correction in their violent crime stats for 2022. Did they undercount violent crime? And why FBI trends are opposite The National Crime Victimization Survey? They didn’t answer those questions but said there will be increasing transparency. And big cities like New York and LA resumed reporting their crime statistics to the FBI in 2023, when the FBI claims, again, that violent crime went down.
Full Measure staff, “Crime Stats,” Full Measure, January 12, 2025.
