Big Questions About Accuracy, Bias Raised After FBI Releases New Crime Stats

Nick Arama reporting for RedState 

The FBI is out with its numbers for murders and other violent crimes over the past year. The numbers allege that violent crime dropped in 2021. Democrats are likely to use that, given that crime is such an important concern with Americans right now. As we noted, 72 percent think it’s a big issue — and they prefer Republicans on the issue.

We’re already getting headlines like this about the new FBI report from the MSM.

Even though murders went up according to the report by 4.3 percent, take a gander at this take on it — the rise “slowed.”

Or it was “flat” even though the report said it went up by almost five percent.

But there are some big problems with the report, including that they left out some major high-crime cities in the process, including New York and Los Angeles.

Experts say the data, released as part of the FBI’s Uniform Crime Report on Wednesday, has some glaring holes due to an “overwhelming” lack of participation by police.

Nearly 40% of all law enforcement agencies — including in the nation’s two largest cities — failed to submit any data to the feds, who reported that violent crimes ticked down by about 1% across the country, from 1,326,600 in 2020 to 1,313,200 in 2021.

The FBI and Justice Department instead made estimates for those cities, according to Bloomberg.

So the FBI and DOJ — which already have been accused of issues of bias — are “estimating” the statistics right before the very important midterms? I’m sure there’s no problem there at all. In other words, we can’t trust what these statistics say at all when they don’t have accurate numbers from some of the highest crime areas.

According to the Brennan Center, the 2021 report only used data from law enforcement agencies representing half the population, whereas prior reports used data from those representing over 95 percent of Americans. So one would think it’s a lot less accurate.

Now, part of this is the switchover to the new system on which states/local police departments are not up to speed. But if you know that you don’t have almost half the country’s stats, how can you even pretend that this is a credible report? You can’t. But the Democrats are certainly going to try to spin this report for all it is worth.

The FBI stats used to be considered the gold standard. Now even that seems in shambles.