It was once remarked by Mark Twain that, ‘The three kinds of deception include lies, extremely foul lies, and statistics.’ By August 2025, the American people had come to distinctively understand that government statistics, particularly those concerning crime rates, are to be consumed with a hint of skepticism. In 2024, the credibility of the FBI’s annual Uniform Crime Report, previously regarded as the authoritative source for crime statistics, came into question. This was due in large part to the Biden Administration which significantly eroded the citizens’ faith in the government, including the FBI.
The second Trump administration faced the Herculean task of rebuilding some level of this lost trust among the populace. However, an unintended positive consequence of the entire debacle was that it led to a significant decline in confidence in the Democratic Party, reaching an unprecedented low. I pointed out in a 2024 piece the disturbing trend of numerous cities, predominantly left-leaning, opting out of sharing their crime data with the FBI. With no data submitted, it essentially signified a non-existence of crime in those areas.
In the year 2024 alone, nearly 7000 institutions preferred to withhold crime-related information. It’s interesting to note that the absence of such data submission was largely commonplace in major population centers. In 2022, even Wyoming’s two major cities refrained from sharing data, although their figures would be paltry compared to behemoths like California and New York City.
The rationale behind cities not reporting to the FBI can be boiled down to two primary factors that interestingly illuminate the political divide in the country. Blue cities and states are hesitant to share data exposing their escalating crime rates as that would directly reflect the disastrous outcomes of the Democrats’ policies. Even more alarming is the fact that the rampant crime witnessed in these regions is a result of deliberate political decisions.
In reality, there is no mandate for blue cities or states to become breeding grounds for violence and crime. Criminal elements, it appears, are regarded as an important component of their constituency. Looking at this situation, red cities and states are backing out from reporting because of a significant loss of faith in the FBI – not just in its ability to enforce laws impartially and effectively, but its ability to report crime statistics accurately.
There’s also an understanding among these cities and states that their relatively small crime rates might be magnified in correlation with the blue regions’ manipulated statistics and the FBI’s uncritical acceptance of such manipulated data. On one hand, there’s the practical need for a trustworthy national database on crime. On the other, it’s typically the citizens residing in crime-prone cities like Washington, D.C., who end up being the best sources of information.
These residents, despite being told that their neighborhoods are devoid of crime, experience a starkly different reality with carjackings and shootings being regular occurrences in their areas. Amid the recent upheaval over the significant overhaul of unemployment data by the Labor Department, the Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS) has released a report containing suspiciously low violent crime rates for certain states.
However, the BJS’s data faced opposition from the fact that Phoenix PD, Arizona’s largest law enforcement agency, reported a sharp rise in its homicide rate by 42%, and also a surge in the overall violent crime rate by 9% during the same period. One might wonder how the BJS landed in such an erroneous position. The BJS relies on the National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS), which doesn’t include submissions from police departments but gathers information from actual victims of crimes.
This approach is generally sound, but the dynamics changed in 2020 and 2021 during the height of the Covid-19 crisis. The Census Bureau ceased all in-person interviews of crime victims during those years, rendering the data gathered during that period irrelevant. In 2020, the FBI posted a record-breaking 30% increase in homicides nationwide, even as the NCVS reported a decrease in violent crime.
This contradiction was expected, given there were no victims interviewed during this period. Taking into account the refusal of approximately 7000 law enforcement agencies to report to the FBI, this increase is plausible, especially considering that numerous left-leaning institutions are actively obscuring their crime rate hikes.
In essence, the refusal of statistical bodies to scrutinize their own methodologies and execution opens the door to erroneous results. When such organizations succumb to the effects of groupthink, they often neglect to question the accuracy and credibility of the data generated by their chosen methods or processes.
Restoring public trust in governance is a daunting task that Donald Trump embarked upon, and it remains an imperative given how recklessly and intentionally it was squandered. At the end of the day, restoring government credibility won’t be achieved overnight, and it may take significant time to completely regain what was deliberately cast aside.
The post The Deceptive Dance of Crime Statistics in America appeared first on Real News Now.
About Author
