Now that election time is on, is there any such thing as an honest statistic from the Biden-Harris administration?

The indefatigable John Lott at RealClearInvestigations has ratted out another one:

When the FBI originally released the “final” crime data for 2022 in September 2023, it reported that the nation’s violent crime rate fell by 2.1%. This quickly became, and remains, a Democratic Party talking point to counter Donald Trump’s claims of soaring crime.

But the FBI has quietly revised those numbers, releasing new data that shows violent crime increased in 2022 by 4.5%. The new data includes thousands more murders, rapes, robberies, and aggravated assaults.

The Bureau – which has been at the center of partisan storms – made no mention of these revisions in its September 2024 press release. 

RCI discovered the change through a cryptic reference on the FBI website that states: “The 2022 violent crime rate has been updated for inclusion in CIUS, 2023.” But there is no mention that the numbers increased. One only sees the change by downloading the FBI’s new crime data and comparing it to the file released last year.

After the FBI released its new crime data in September, a USA Today headline read: “Violent crime dropped for third straight year in 2023, including murder and rape.”

So the claim that crime is up 'is all in your head' as politicians told the public, which perceived it, turned out to be not so all in their heads, it was right there in the actual government statistics which had been covered up and falsified for political purposes.

As Lott notes, it calls to mind the other other government statistics that have been fudged and revised, such as the Bureau of Labor Statistics' jobs figures, repeatedly so, and always to the advantage of the Democrats.

The House Budget Committee noted this one (among many) last August:

WASHINGTON, D.C. – Today, the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) released its preliminary annual benchmark review of employment data for March 2024. BLS found that there were 818,000 fewer jobs than previously reported.

Chairman Arrington Statement:

"Based on more comprehensive data released from state unemployment tax records, the Biden Bureau of Labor Statistics acknowledges they were way off on the number of new jobs created between March of 2023 and March of 2024 by almost one million or 30%, which is five times their average margin of error.

The economy is the top issue in this presidential race and the recent downwardly revised job numbers taken together with persistently high prices and interest rates bellies a much weaker Biden-Harris economy than we were led to believe.

The tax, spend, and regulate economic agenda of Biden-Harris has failed and no one knows that better than working Americans, which is why for six straight months, according to the Consumer Confidence Index, more Americans believe we are headed for a recession.”

The Bureau of Economic Analysis revises GDP figures a lot, too.

Here's a Reuters headline from 2023:

US GDP revised down in every first quarter from 2020 to 2022

Inflation, meaning, Consumer Price Index, or CPI, gets Biden-friendly revisions, too.

Here's what Dutch investment bank ING wrote in February:

Last year's update of CPI seasonal adjustment factors was a big deal, showing inflation momentum was stronger than thought at the end of 2022, catching both the market and the Federal Reserve off guard. Friday sees the 2023 update with the market watchful to what it may mean for the timing of the first Fed rate cut this year.

Sound a little Biden-friendly, those initial releases that moved the markets? If I were a trader in the stock or bond markets and constantly seeing these revisions, I think I'd be going bonkers. Traders trade on official data released that's presumed to be accurate. That's apparently a thing of the past.

Illegal border crossings have seen revisions, too, and always on the less politically convenient upside, unless they revise the counting method which takes it to the politically more palatable downside. They did that, of course.

Wait till they start counting ballots.

Had Lott not been on the case, the FBI would have gotten away with that sneaky stealth revision, showing that violent crime was up multifold, not down, as Democrats superciliously stated, the Biden-Harris administration promoted, and the mainstream media parroted.

He also noted this from a couple of academic experts:

“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.”

“It is up to the FBI to explain what they have done, and they haven’t explained these large changes,” Dr. Thomas Marvell, the president of Justec Research, a criminal justice statistical research organization, told RCI.

So they've never done this as much as they're doing it now and they haven't explained their revision, either, both of which makes the average observer, as well as expert, wonder how much anyone should believe them at all.

It points to a politicized agency, given the amount of hay Democrats have been reaping from the artificially lowered crime statistics, even as the public felt uneasy given their own "lived experiences."

Lott has got to be one of the most careful, in-depth researchers I've ever encountered. I used to edit his work at Investor's Business Daily when I was on the editorial page staff a few years ago, and oh, he was flawless -- his hard facts always checked out, his tight, graceful, tight writing sparkled on the page, and he always had a perfect nose for what was news. Editors love him.

We have seen that the FBI has been politicized elsewhere, in their involvement in the Steele dossier, and in falsifying surveillance requests for judges in order to spy on president they don't like, and with very little consequence to the miscreants involved who got caught. We have seen it in their post-presidency lawfare against President Trump, coming in with the big guns to raid the president's home over classified documents every ex-chief executive, and plenty of non-chief executives such as Joe Biden, take home with them. We've seen it in the bizarre statement of FBI director Christopher Wray, who claimed President Trump probably wasn't shot at the Butler, Pennsylvania assassination attempt, which sent him to the hospital, a bullet actually hitting his ear in front of the cameras.

But this sneaky book cooking takes the cake.

If this revision is political, it's part of a pattern of bad behavior by this agency that has yet to see any accountability. But it's also just one more cog in the wheel of data revisions happening all of a sudden under the Biden-Harris administration. That suggests that someone is directing it.

Who is directing all of these agencies to fake their data to support Democrats and then revise when no one's looking? It probably happens in every agency, and this is unique to the Biden-Harris administration, the one that prefers style over substances and to heck with what the public is enduring.

Like the Brezhnev regime of the old Soviet Union, just pull down the shades and pretend the train is moving. That's Biden-Harris in a nutshell, taking us down the road to the banana republics and communist satrapies, both of which make their data say whatever they want it to say.

That's going to get around, and nobody is going to follow U.S. data. Might as well not collect it at all, and just turn the matter over to Elon Musk.

Update: The headline figure has been corrected. The data dynamics are better explained in this piece at Issues & Insights here.

Image: FBI seal, via Wikimedia Commons // public domain