A key moment in the presidential debate between former President Donald Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris came after ABC News moderator David Muir asked for details on how Trump would deal with illegal immigrants who had been released into the country by the Biden-Harris administration.
Trump said he would target migrants who committed crimes, noting that “crime here is up and through the roof.”
Muir interrupted Trump, something he never did to Vice President Kamala Harris, retorting, “President Trump, as you know, the FBI says overall violent crime is coming down in this country.”
To which Trump responded, “The FBI — they were defrauding statements. 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.”
Muir is right that FBI data show violent crime is down. However, Trump is also right that there are major problems with the FBI’s data. The comparison with problematic jobs data from the Department of Labor is a good one. The agency was forced to lower the number of jobs created during the Biden administration by almost a million, which showed that its previous figures were consistently misleading.
The falsehood of the FBI data can, however, be shown up in real time. One does not have to wait for an annual revision. This is because it is not the only crime data the federal government collects and releases each year. The Bureau of Justice Statistics operates the National Crime Victimization Survey. It releases new data every September, and it did so last week. They show Trump is right about crime and Muir is wrong. Crime is up, not down.
For decades, the FBI’s Uniform Crime Reporting Program and the National Crime Victimization Survey largely tracked each other. When crime went up in the FBI data, it also went up in the Department of Justice data. The percentage increases and decreases in crime, particularly for certain specific crimes, didn’t always match precisely, but the trends mostly coincided.
That stopped when President Joe Biden took office, and the FBI changed how local law enforcement agencies report crime to the bureau. The process was made more complicated and burdensome. As a result, the percentage of agencies submitting data to the FBI fell, with some of the largest and most troublesome cities failing to report at all. The cities included Chicago, Los Angeles, and New York City.
Muir left this little detail out of his supposed “fact” check.
The DOJ, however, did not change its methodology. It interviews 240,000 respondents every year to track crime rates. This is a much bigger sample than a typical professional political poll, which contacts only about 2,000 people. So, the data is exceptionally strong. They show that, as Trump said, crime is much higher under the Biden-Harris administration than it was during his presidency.
According to the latest DOJ numbers, since Trump’s last year in office, total violent crime has risen 37%, assault has risen 33%, total property crime has risen 8%, and motor vehicle theft has risen 41%. No wonder 77% of voters, and even 58% of Democrats, believe crime is higher than it was, according to Gallup.
If Muir and his ABC News colleagues want to know why trust in news media is at an all-time low, they should look in the mirror. You cannot gaslight the public into believing the Biden-Harris administration has been good for the country. Voters know the nation is on the wrong track. They want change. Phony “fact” checks may have helped Harris for one night, but voters know the truth.