The Patriot Post® · The Real Spin Cycle on FBI Crime Stats

The FBI’s annual report on crime in the nation isn’t what it used to be. As the FBI updates its methods for reporting crimes, and the Leftmedia ramps up its efforts to blame guns and COVID and to make the narrative about crime be one of victim groups, getting to the truth can be a challenge.

The FBI says that “national violent crime decreased an estimated 1.7% in 2022 compared to 2021 estimates.” Murder dropped 6.1%, rape fell 5.4%, and assault and robbery both decreased a little more than 1%. That’s great news, right? Maybe.

The problem is that the previous year didn’t have all the data. And by not all the data, we mean that, as the Associated Press notes, “nearly two-fifths of all policing agencies failed to participate, including big cities like New York, Los Angeles and Miami.”

This year’s report was better, but it still had holes. “In 2022, 83% of US law enforcement agencies submitted data to the federal government, which means that about 10% of the population is not represented in this data,” The Guardian reports.

Also remember that a lot of reporting to police is voluntary, and crimes like rapes and robberies are not always reported.

With the caveats out of the way, we’ll move to the politicization of crime. As far as the Leftmedia is concerned, it’s all about who or what you blame for crime.

Naturally, most outlets blame “an increase in guns,” as NPR framed it. NPR also says crime rose in both Alabama and Massachusetts, so it can’t be blamed on Democrats. The AP offers this bit of related misinformation: “Gun-safety advocates decry the loosening of gun laws, especially in conservative-leaning states around the U.S.” As if law-abiding Republicans are the ones committing crime.

The FBI report “underscores how pervasive gun violence has become,” says The New York Times. In fact, “Firearms were used in almost half a million violent crimes across the country, about the same number as in 2021.”

No news reporters seem to care that firearms are also used at least that many times each year to prevent crimes. Nor do they care that firearms sales were increasing for many years while crime went down, or that black women are the fastest-growing demographic of gun buyers, or that law-abiding, permit-holding gun owners are not the ones committing crime.

The Times also offers borderline disinformation: “The profile of the victims has shifted significantly. In 2020, gun violence became the leading cause of death for American children, and in 2022 things became even worse: The number of children killed in shootings increased by almost 12 percent, and those wounded increased by almost 11 percent.” As the “fact-checkers” like to say, that’s “missing context.” Most of those “children” are older adolescents who are involved in gang or drug violence.

Another fascinating and revealing thing from media coverage is the universal effort to blame the coronavirus pandemic, which the AP says “created huge social disruption and upended support systems.” To be sure, crime did spike beginning in 2020, but it wasn’t caused by a virus from China. (Though maybe Democrats tyrannically shutting down everything might have irritated some people.)

Something else happened in 2020 that ignited “mostly peaceful protests,” otherwise known as violence and unrest in urban centers.

That’s right — the death of George Floyd, which Joe Biden disgracefully elevated again last week, and the ensuing summer of rage are to blame.

As the Times notes, “There were 25 percent more homicides in 2022 than in 2019.” Many of those murders are blacks killed by other blacks. Don’t black lives matter?

Speaking of blacks, another big feature of the FBI report was so-called “hate crimes.” NPR says, “Black people, Jewish people and gay men were the most likely to be targeted.” Well, yeah. Not to be insensitive, but only the Left’s select “marginalized” groups can be the victims of hate crime, so it stands to reason that increases would only happen among those groups. And as noted above, however, black-on-black crime is a huge problem. How often is that also true of gays? We’ve noted the case of Matthew Shepard twice in recent days.

There’s so much more to say, but, in short, we’re outraged at every robbery, carjacking, and rape. We lament every human life needlessly taken. Yet until the media and our elected representatives tell the truth about crime and its causes, and until the Democrats who’ve run our cities (into the ground) for decades change their soft-on-crime policies, more property will be destroyed or taken, and more lives will be lost.