Media coverage of weather is a wonderful thing, but if a large number of known hurricanes and tornadoes go unreported how safe is the general public? The same applies to violent crime. The unfortunate thing is that the crime scenario, currently, is not hypothetical.
Turns out those Donald Trump debate comments, for which the former president was so heavily fact-checked by many media, were on the mark:
“Despite their fraudulent statements that they made, crime in this country is through the roof, and we have a new form of crime, it's called migrant crime, and it's happening at levels that nobody thought possible,” Trump said during the Sept. 10 debate hosted by ABC News.
Moderator David Muir quickly countered “President Trump, as you know, the FBI says overall violent crime is actually coming down in this country.”
Trump responded with, “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.”
RealClearInvestigations reported this week that the FBI quietly adjusted its numbers for crime reported in 2022. The new numbers show crime actually increased by 4.9%. Previously, the Bureau reported that crime for 2022 decreased by 1.7%.
The revision is a swing of 6.6%.
“Unfortunately, if you read the press release, there was no mention of the change for 2022. If you read the report itself, there was just a footnote that vaguely indicated that there had been an update to the 2022 numbers but with no explanation about the size of the change or why the change was made,” Dr. John R. Lott, Jr., president of the Crime Prevention Research Center, noted on Washington Watch Thursday.
There are more numbers in this New York Post report.
Free and loose with facts
In addition to the stealthy revision, it appears the Biden administration’s FBI is playing free and loose with how it categorizes crime data. Lott explains.
“The important thing is that there are two types of numbers for crime. There are crimes reported to police, and that's what the FBI measures. Then there are total crimes, and that's what the Bureau of Justice Statistics measures. Most people care about total crimes, not just what gets reported to police,” Lott told show host Tony Perkins.
Last month the Bureau of Justice Statistics released its own report showing that total violent crime had increased by 55% during the Biden administration after falling by 15% under Trump, the CPRC president pointed out.
“That’s historically the largest three-year change that we've had since the Bureau of Justice Statistics started collecting data on that,” Lott added.
Most media coverage, certainly the ABC moderators’ real-time fact-checks, focuses solely on the FBI’s under-reported number – which creates the potential for a public ignorant to a coming storm. Lott contends the media omissions are intentional.
“They keep on calling it 'crime data' when it should just be referred to as 'reported crimes.' The reason why I think that they wanted to focus only on that and give like no coverage in the mainstream media to the Bureau of Justice statistics report that came out last month is that it fits their narrative that [crime] was falling.”
Now the narrative has been shown wrong – but the new data is ignored from most outlets.
“It’s clear that the FBI numbers [now] show an increase, but you're not seeing anybody going back and saying, ‘Oops, you know all those news stories that we've been having there? They we're wrong,’” Lott said.
The people behind the numbers
The problem really hits home when local people see their children dying. That’s what Sid Edwards, a longtime football coach and educator, saw in Baton Rouge earlier this year. One of his players, having recently turned 15 years old, was among four youngsters shot on a Baton Rouge street. Edwards’ player died.
“We had to bury that young man. It’s mind-boggling that our youth have this to deal with daily,” he shared with Washington Watch.
Edwards explained that he called his team together for a meeting to counsel the players. Their response, he recalls, was "callous."
"It was just another day in their lives,” he said. “That was an eye-opener for me, how desensitized those young people have become. It’s expected.”
The feeling of hopelessness is “rampant” but is not isolated in Baton Rouge, according to the coach. “We have a lot of bright kids on that side of town who could have bright futures. It’s all over the parish,” Edwards said.
Edwards has qualified to run for mayor in Baton Rouge with the hope of making a difference.
Seeing through the Biden cover-up
Most Americans aren’t buying the administration’s take on crime. A Gallup poll released in late July showed that a majority of Americans view the U.S. crime problem as highly serious. Almost half of them see crime worsening in their immediate area.
“Obviously, that also fits in with the immigration issue,” Lott said.
“If you live in many urban areas in the United States, whether it be Los Angeles or Chicago or DC or New York, you go to a CVS or Walgreens and you see almost everything's behind plexiglass. If you want to buy something, a sales clerk has to come over, unlock it and then stand next to you while you read the different ingredients on the packages trying to decide if it’s what you want to buy. People know that wasn't the case a few years ago.”
It's not just retail. Emergency calls are different and more difficult – and that leads to fewer crimes reported, says Lott. “In many parts of this country, if you call 9-1-1, they’ll ask you if the criminal is there committing the crime, and if the criminal's already left, what they'll tell you is you can come down to the police station and wait in line and fill out a report.”
In a separate interview with Fox News, Lott contedned that individuals who previously would have reported crimes to the police "are going to say it's just not worth it ... to go do that."
