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Right wing news media today reporting a "quiet" revision to FBI crime statistics, revealing that violent crime rose in 2022, contrary to their initial September 2023 report (and broadly contrary to a recent historical trend).
As the linked article notes, adjustments of this nature are not uncommon, but this particular adjustment flies in the face of fact checks and hit pieces directed against right wing media and political candidates who, apparently, knew better than the FBI. I have been unable to find any retractions thus far, however (and of course do not expect any).
The FBI's process for assembling crime statistics has been under revision for a couple of years, leading to a variety of difficulties for those (like reporters) accustomed to relying on the statistics to establish the truth of perceived trends. As far as I can tell, the initial revisions were motivated by the same sort of social engineering goals that led realty websites to remove crime maps from home search tools. But now maybe some of those changes have been rolled back? It's not totally clear to me what's happening there, beyond a government bureaucracy seemingly looking for ways to prevent the unvarnished truth from generating too much wrongthink while also staving off accusations of being even more useless than usual.
(Or maybe there's a "Schrodinger's Violence" problem, where they need to show increased violence to make strong arguments against the Second Amendment, while also showing decreased violence to bolster
Biden'sHarris' claim tore-electability?)While violent crime is still much lower, per capita, than it was ~35 years ago, it is of course still much higher than it was circa 1960, when the United States was a very different place, demographically. The 21st century nadir seems to be around 2012, and the trend since has been a slight but relatively persistent rise.
Will the FBI's adjustment make a difference in the race for the White House? I guess I'm skeptical; left wing news outlets don't appear to be reporting on the adjustment at all, and since it's about 2022, it's "old news" anyway. The falsehood is out there, its work is done; the truth has only just managed to lace its shoes, and here the race is almost over.
It would be crazy if this is just some long term strategy by the FBI to make themselves look good. Each year they publish juiced figures that the media can gush over then later on they retract the juiced figures. Retracting the juiced figures is necessary because otherwise each year the FBI would have to make progressively larger adjustments until juicing was no longer feasible.
Aren't organizations incentivized to make the problem they're fighting look worse? Students reach new lows on standardized tests - give more funding to schools; We're falling behind in a particular field of research - give more money for researchers; No one wants to pay for elite art - subsidize elite art; More generally, if you express even the faintest interest in supporting a charity or a nonprofit, they will bombard you with newsletters about how terrible things are, and how the world will end if you don't send them money RIGHT NOW!
And correct me if I'm wrong, but aren't most of these crimes outside of FBI jurisdiction to begin with?
Whoever those fudged numbers are supposed to make look better, it's probably not the FBI, and outside political pressure seems pretty likely, especially when we know for a fact it goes unpunished in the event it's discovered, and undisputable.
It's weird how that happens. We should do the opposite. When a problem gets worse, we should defund and replace the failing organizations who are responsible. (For example, San Francisco area homeless orgs).
On the other hand, when organizations succeed we should give them more money (For example, SpaceX).
I'd argue we should do neither. whether the amount of homeless went up or down, it may not have anything to do with the homeless orgs at all. They didn't make the problem, and they may deserve anywhere from 0-100% of the credit for each person who is no longer homeless, or 0-100% of the blame for failing to solve the problem.
For best results, you'd need metrics that represent what the homeless org did, how well it worked, and the reasons why it didn't work better. In the FBI's case it would be things like the number of cases investigated vs solved, time spent per investigation, etc.
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