The Patriot Post® · Memo to Harris: Violent Crime Did NOT Decline

Two years ago, it was clear that the FBI’s annual crime data was being manipulated.

At that time, in “Biden and Harris Collude to Cover Up the Crime Scene,” I wrote, “Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, and their Democrat Party cadre in Congress and across the nation are desperately trying to divert attention from the record surge of murder and violence they unleashed nationwide in 2020, an epidemic of crime.”

Two years earlier Demos kicked off their “summer of rage” riots ahead of the 2020 election, insisting that our justice system was infested with “systemic racism.” That was a lie. They supported their Black Lives Matter and antifa fascist thug violence while vilifying law enforcement officers. Across the nation, the mayors of Demo-controlled urban centers enacted measures to release criminals while simultaneously defunding the police.

For the record, Harris led the 2020 Demo Defund the Police chorus, insisting, “For far too long, the status quo thinking has been to believe that by putting more police on the street, you’re going to have more safety — and that’s just wrong.” Foment riots and put fewer cops on the street. What could go wrong?

Curiously (said with an eye roll), in 2021, after Biden took office, the FBI and DoJ’s Department of Justice Statistics, previously the gold standard sources for crime data, altered the way crime data was collected nationwide, and that change obfuscated the real data on violent crime. I was acutely aware of this politically motivated charade because I have researched year-over-year crime data for decades as the basis for columns such as “Race and Violence: A Politically Inconvenient Truth.” The “new” crime reports basically buried or did not collect all the data.

I operate on the simple principle, “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.” Apparently, however, the FBI, which had its integrity seriously compromised by some high-level deep state hacks during the Trump years, appears to have “fixed” the data for the Biden/Harris regime.

Ahead of this year’s already rigged presidential election, in its 2023 annual crime data report for the prior year, the FBI reported the surge in violent crime between 2020 and 2023 reversed course — a nominal 2.1% reduction. What fantastic news for the Harris/Walz ticket. Of course, that slight reduction in crime reported by the FBI is kind of like the slight reduction in the inflation rate year over year — prices have still ballooned in the years Harris has been in office, and so has crime.

Typical of the FBI’s “crime reduction” layup for Biden and Haris was this claim when promoting their gun-confiscation agenda in June before Harris booted Biden to the curb. According to Biden: “You know, the year before I came to the presidency, the murder rate was the highest increase on record. Last year, we saw the largest decrease of murder in the history of (inaudible). And those rates are continuing to fall faster than ever. Last year, we also saw one of the lowest rates of all violent crime in nearly 50 years. Murder, rape, aggravated assault, robbery all dropped sharply, along with burglary and property crime.”

Well, actually, no.

Since then, Trump has challenged the repeated claims by Harris that “crime is down” much as they claim “inflation is down.”

Recall in the Trump v. Harris debate how much help ABC “moderators” gave Harris, errantly “fact-checking” Trump real-time on crime. Trump declared what we all know: “Crime here is up and through the roof. Despite their fraudulent statements that they made. Crime in this country is through the roof.” ABC’s David Muir quickly responded, “President Trump, as you know, the FBI says overall violent crime is coming down in this country, but Vice President the…” Trump interrupted Muir: “Excuse me, the FBI — 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.”

As we knew then and have confirmed now, you can fact-check ABC “false” and fact-check Trump “mostly true.” The FBI did not wantonly commit “fraud,” but it certainly was deceptive — and the timing certainly suggests that deception was intentional.

The fact is, as Trump noted, the FBI has not been including some of the worst data since it “fixed” the reporting process in 2021 — a point I made in the aforementioned column two years ago.

Now, as it turns out, not only is violent crime still 40% higher than it was in the year prior to the Demos’ summer of rage festivities, but the FBI has altered its 2023 report data making clear now that violent crime did not reverse its upward trend in 2022.

That FBI revision includes thousands of previously unreported crimes, including 1,699 murders, 7,780 rapes, more than 33,000 robberies, and more than 37,000 aggravated assaults.

And the revised assessment: Violent crime increased in 2022 by 4.5% — a 6.6% swing.

As College of William and Mary Professor and crime researcher Carl Moody kindly observed, “The huge changes in 2021 and 2022, especially without an explanation, make it difficult to trust the FBI data.”

Do ya think?

So about the FBI’s latest report two weeks ago that violent crime declined 3% in 2023, the fact is only 85% of crime data was reported to the FBI in 2023. No word yet on when the actual violent crime numbers for 2023 will be updated, but don’t expect that lying Kamala Harris will stop repeating the “old data.”