The FBI’s recent release of updated crime statistics further confirmed what has by now become obvious – federal agencies are cooking the books on everything from murder rates to inflation data in order to sell the Biden-Harris administration as a great success. Meanwhile, the American people are stuck living in a far less rosy reality.
The FBI’s 2023 crime statistics, which came out last week, appeared to show a marked decrease in violent crime. According to the data, murders declined 11.6 percent from 2022 to 2023, while rapes were down 9.4 percent and aggravated assaults were down 2.8 percent.
The updated numbers seemed to vindicate claims from the Biden administration and Kamala Harris’s presidential campaign that Biden-Harris policies have made the country safer. The corporate media dutifully released a flood of articles to that effect, with NBC News assuring readers that “public perception of crime is often out of step with the facts.”
Even before this latest data release, ABC debate moderator David Muir attempted to “fact check” former President Donald Trump on crime during his debate with Harris, saying that “the FBI says overall violent crime is coming down in this country.” Trump responded, “Excuse me, the FBI – they were defrauding statements. They didn’t include the worst cities.”
While neither ABC nor any other corporate outlet have bothered to report it, Trump was exactly correct. In 2021, the FBI abruptly stopped using its old reporting system to collect data from cities and localities, replacing it with the “National Incident-Based Reporting System” (NIBRS). The new reporting system, far more complicated and inefficient than the previous one, was a nightmare for police agencies to navigate.
As a result, over 1,000 police department jurisdictions were not included in the FBI’s 2022 crime report. As noted by criminal justice nonprofit the Marshall Project, in total, this omitted data constitutes “a quarter of our population” – including some of America’s most violent cities and neighborhoods.
Unsurprisingly, the government’s annual survey of crime victims, which is arguably now a better metric of the nation’s crime problem given the glaring issues with NIBRS, shows that crime is still on the rise. That report found that 22.5 out of every 1,000 residents were the victim of a violent crime in 2023 and 102 of every 1,000 reported being the victim of a property crime – levels that remain virtually unchanged from 2022 and far higher than when Trump left office in 2020.
As galling as the manipulation of crime statistics is, the administration’s sleight of hand on immigration may be even worse.
As AMAC Newsline has previously reported, Democrats and their corporate media allies have selectively touted declining illegal border crossings “between ports of entry” to make it seem like the White House has the crisis under control. But in reality, the administration has merely changed the incentive structure to encourage illegal aliens to cross at points of entry and avoid being counted in the metrics traditionally used to gauge the severity of the situation at the border.
The combination of gotaways, the hopelessly broken nature of the asylum system, and rampant abuse of the president’s parole authority means that the illegal immigration crisis is still just as bad as it has ever been under Joe Biden and his “border czar” Kamala Harris.
On the other big liability for Harris, the economy, the administration has similarly sought to play fast and loose with the facts to cover the truth.
Perhaps the most glaring instance of this is on the jobs front, where Biden and Harris have repeatedly claimed to have created “15 million jobs.” As a basic analysis of government jobs data shows, most of the jobs “created” over the past four years are really jobs coming back from COVID-19 layoffs. Trendlines also show that the country is still far behind the pre-pandemic jobs trend seen under Trump.
Moreover, the Biden-Harris Bureau of Labor Statistics has been forced to revise down its initial jobs numbers almost every month of the administration – a pattern that smacks of an intentional effort to mislead the public. In total, from January to May of this year alone, the initial jobs numbers were off by nearly 250,000.
Democrats and the corporate media have also touted victory over inflation by pointing to declining inflation rates, which have now come down near three percent after topping nine percent in 2022. But once again, the headlines don’t tell the full story. Cumulative inflation since Biden and Harris took office is north of 20 percent, and millions of Americans are still struggling to make ends meet. The administration has done nothing of note to actually bring prices down.
In another era, a robust and engaged journalist class would call out all of these discrepancies for what they are: blatant attempts by taxpayer-funded agencies and the White House to mislead the public about the true state of affairs in the country. Instead, however, the vast majority of the media has willingly amplified the administration’s lies and deceptions.
Still, poll after poll shows that the American people understand the country is heading in the wrong direction. Try as they might, Joe Biden and Kamala Harris can’t simply create an alternate reality built on rigged statistics and expect voters to ignore the much more alarming reality right in front of them.
Andrew Shirley is a veteran speechwriter and AMAC Newsline columnist. His commentary can be found on X at @AA_Shirley.
