Dr. John Lott has a new piece at The Federalist. The FBI has a big transparency problem. For a year, the media has been using the FBI’s estimates of reported crime to claim that crime has been falling. When the FBI released its numbers for 2023 in September...
A writer at the Kansas City Star, David Mastio, received a response from the FBI (we never did). Mastio's bottom line is: "Here’s what I’ve learned in decades of covering Washington: When bad news is false, agency press people go out of their way to make it crystal...
As we have pointed out many times, the U.S. Department of Justice has two measures of crime: the FBI measure of reported crime and the Bureau of Justice Statistics measure of total crime. The relationship between these two measures is quite shocking for the Biden...
USA Today’s headline on the FBI's reported crime data released in September 2023 claims “Violent crime dropped for second straight year in 2023, including murder and rape.” There are two errors in their headline. First, that it is the FBI’s measure of reported crime...
The murder rate in 2019 was 5.168 and 2023 in 5.748, an 11.23% increase. As noted before, the Centers for Disease Control showed an increase in ~murders (homicide, excluding legal intervention) from 2020 to 2022 while the FBI data shows a drop. The CDC data showed a...
The raw data on the changes in 2021 and 2022 are shown farther down the page. The newly released FBI data shows that reported violent crime (murder, rape, robbery, and aggravated assault) fell by 3.5% in 2023, but they have revised the 2022 data to show a 4.5%...