There is a lot of attention on the Trump administration removing dozens of Department of Justice ( DOJ) and FBI officials involved in charging 1, 500 Jan. 6 defendants, but one area of politicization in the FBI and DOJ that isn’t getting attention: crime data.
The political conversation is governed by those who manipulate and distort crime information because they are able to handle the distortion of the information.
I’ve seen a lot of information that was manipulated. Until January 2021, I worked in the U. S. Department of Justice as the senior consultant for research and data in the Office of Justice Programs, and part of my job was to evaluate , the FBI’s effective killing information.  , During my time with the DOJ, I discovered that the FBI either missed or misidentified many , cases , of residents using artillery to prevent problems. For example, only 14 of the 350 effective shooter situations identified between 2014 and 2023 were still being stopped by trained people.
The Crime Prevention Research Center ( CPRC ), which I run, has found many more missed cases and is keeping an , stopped-active-shooter-incidents/?_thumbnail_id=16421″ target=”_blank” rel=”noreferrer noopener”>updated list. As such, the CPRC , numbers , show a little different history: Out of 515 effective shooter incidents from 2014 to 2023, armed citizens , stopped , 180, saving many innocent lives. Yet 27 instances in which a law-abiding member with a weapon stopped an assailant before he could fire a shot were excluded from our analysis.
The CPRC estimates that law-abiding people who carry guns have stopped more than 35 percent of active murders over the past ten years and 39.6 percentage over the past five years. This number is about nine times higher than the FBI’s four percentage measure.
Even more so when only considering places where individuals are legally permitted to carry a rifle is revealed. After all, you can’t assume that law-abiding individuals will prevent problems in gun-free areas. We believe that armed civilians have stopped 51 % of effective shootings over the past ten percent in areas where law-abiding individuals are permitted to carry firearms.
However, the FBI data is missing so many defense weapon uses that it’s hard to believe it is sudden, and especially as they also previously corrected mistakes that I brought to their attention. No single needs to take our word for these lost or misidentified situations because we list out each situation and provide links to the main sources.
The FBI’s actions were brought to a head during the presidential election next year, which also raised a serious accountability issue. For a time, the internet used the FBI’s quotes of described violence for 2022 to say that crime was falling under the Biden management. Relying on the 2022 data, news headlines like NPR asserted:” Violent crime is dropping fast in the US— even if Americans don’t believe it”.
David Muir of ABC used this deceptive information to “fact check” Donald Trump during the Kamala Harris presidential debate. Despite their false statements that they made, the crime here is up and through the roof,” Trump said.
Muir rebutted him with,” President Trump, as you know, the FBI says overall violent crime is actually coming down in this country”.
Trump was right. When the FBI released its numbers for 2023 in September 2024,  , it hid that it had revised , its earlier crime data for 2021 and 2022, hiding the increase in 2022.
The FBI never mentioned in a press release that the agency had changed its data on violent crimes for 2022 from a 2.1 % drop to a 4.5 % increase. Their full report only tangentially stated in a footnote that they had revised the data. The FBI continued to conceal the revisions just days before an election when crime was a top concern for voters despite numerous press requests for clarification.
Not just the FBI conceals or distorts information, but also other organizations. Under the Biden administration, the Centers for Disease Control ( CDC ) removed data that demonstrated that armed citizens contribute to crime by removing estimates of defensive gun uses from its website. For almost a decade, the , CDC referenced a 2013 , National Academies of Sciences , report noting that people used guns to stop crime , anywhere from about 64, 000 to 3 million times a year.
That decision to remove the data came after gun control activist Mark Bryant, founder of the Gun Violence Archive, lobbied the CDC to remove defensive gun use estimates because it , “has been used so often to stop]gun control ] legislation” by “gun rights folks”. Soon after, the CDC removed defensive gun use estimates from their website.
Other government crime data, such as the hate crime counts that depend on subjective reports, has some serious issues.
Unfortunately, the news media unquestioningly reports these government numbers, and politicians reference them in political debates. And they are frequently employed in court proceedings. If the data supporting those debates is inaccurate and politically biased, we can’t engage in useful debates about crime policy.
I hope the Trump administration will soon restore objectivity to the federal government’s crime statistics.
