During Tuesday night’s debate against Kamala Harris, David Muir and Linsey Davis, President Donald Trump made a statement about crime being up in the United States while highlighting migrant crime as a relatively new category. David Muir was quick to ‘fact-check.’ Spoiler alert: like the other ‘fact checks’ during the debate, Trump was right.
David Muir ‘fact checked’ President Trump stating, “As you know, the FBI says overall violent crime is actually coming down in this country.”
President Trump responded:
“Excuse me, they were [fraudulent] statements. They didn’t include the worst cities. They didn’t include the cities with the worst crime. It was a fraud. Just like their number of 818,000 jobs that they said they created turned out to be a fraud.”
Harris, had nothing to add of substance other than “I think this is so rich, coming from someone who has been prosecuted…” Once again, she could not push back with actual facts or even relevant contributions, but rather resorted to personal attacks against the President. It’s also worth noting that her administration is responsible for those prosecutions. Give yourself a pat on the back.
“Fact-Check” pic.twitter.com/WeTslf9Kmx
— CannCon (@CannConActual) September 12, 2024
The FBI did, in fact, change their reporting system from the Uniform Crime Reporting program (or Summary Reporting System, 2022) according to the Brennan Center, and replaced it with the National Incident Based Reporting System (NIBRS). In their 2021″Understanding the FBI’s 2021 Crime Data” report, the Brennan Center writes, “This system tracks information in much greater detail than the Summary Reporting System and covers many additional types of crimes.”
The Brennan Center then goes on to acknowledge that just over half the population reported the entire year of crime data for 2021, which is far short of the typical 95% that has reported in the past, the report claims. Some of the notable agencies mentioned in the publication that are not reporting data include San Francisco, which won’t be ready to fully report until 2025, and New York State, where only 13% of agencies reported data from 2021.
As The Marshall Project reported in July 2023, last year (2022 presumbaly), “thousands of police agencies fell through the cracks because they didn’t catch up with the changes on time.” In total, they reported 6,000 agencies as missing national crime data, or one-third of the nation’s 18,000 police agencies. And in that year, two key agencies in particular were missing: New York Police Department and Los Angeles Police Department.
The FBI said of the 2021 crime data that they couldn’t say if crime went up, down, or stayed the same, and that all three scenarios are plausible.
In 2022, the violent crime data released by the FBI showed a contradiction to Muir’s fact-check during the debate. Not only was violent crime in New York up from any time ranging back to 2012, but crime in New York under President Trump, from 2017-2021, was lower than any point during the Biden or Obama administrations.
While the total numbers for violent crime are down in 2022, the last year of ‘full’ statistics, there were only 16,100 agencies. Note that that is the total number of agencies, not the population they serve. Specifically, Los Angeles, New York City, Chicago, Phoenix and San Francisco did not report data for 2022. And while the FBI Crime Data Explorer says 16,100 out of 18,930 participated, The Marshall Project reports that 6,097 agencies did not submit data in 2022.
The total number of agencies reporting according to the FBI’s 2022 Participation-by-State data shows some large omissions in the five most populous states, minus Texas:
- California: 559 agencies covering 20.45 million people (39.5 million people total)
- Florida: 73 agencies covering 7.02 million people (21.5 million people total)
- New York: 149 agencies covering 4.58 million people (20.2 million people total)
- Pennsylvania: 132 agencies covering 5.22 million people (13.0 million people total)
X user @amuse posted an article to the platform highlighting the discrepancies in how the data is reported, noting that:
Less than a year after taking office, Biden-Harris’s administration had the FBI dismantle the long-standing crime reporting system, replacing it in 2021 with a new, ‘woke’ system that is optional for state and local law enforcement agencies to use. As a result, at least 6,000 law enforcement agencies aren’t providing data, meaning that 25% of the country’s crime data is not captured by the FBI. This deliberate underreporting skews the statistics, painting a falsely optimistic picture of public safety while real Americans continue to suffer from rising crime rates.
It goes on to say that 52% of crime in New York City is currently downgraded to misdemeanors (unless of course you have to upgrade financial records crimes from misdemeanors to felonies in order to subvert the statute of limitations). Most of these crimes results in diversion programs that lead to the crime not being reported in statistics.
Elon Musk reposted the reporting on the crime data fluctuations and adaptations of the new reporting system:
You are being lied to https://t.co/UBze5xwc5D
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) September 12, 2024
The post goes on to mention “the 70 Soros-backed prosecutors, representing 72 million Americans and half of the nation’s 50 most populous cities and counties, have made it their mission to implement so-called restorative justice.” ‘Restorative justice’ is a refusal “to prosecute violent crimes based on factors such as race or gender.”
