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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.
I remember other discussions on this forum. Inflation and unemployment data. Long arguments about not trusting the economic data. This is why. These figures are totally arbitrary. There is no neutral competent adults-in-the-room authority anymore. Everything is this bad.
I have a friend who used to work at the Fed. He says to the extent that the figures weren't made up, they hsve basically no basis to reality. The numbers they report just reflect the process of the people creating them, which is bureaucratic and dull.
This is just intellectual cowardice. Ignoring for a second that this particular controversy is a total nothingburger (see my reply to @gattsuru), statistics which are in some sense 'constructed' are the only way of understanding any large scale and complex societal phenomena, whether it be crime, inflation or whatever else, and the solution if you don't trust the people constructing them is to investigate the particular processes by which any particular one is constructed to see what flaws there are/might be, whether they be minor or totally disqualifying. Otherwise, there is simply no point discussing anything.
Congratulations, this is an observation every undergraduate social scientist and humanities students has about 6 weeks into their studies - in the same sense this is true, history books also have no 'basis to reality' - they are necessarily vast abstractions and simplifications of an infinite amount of possible evidence. Like E.H. Carr says, evidence is like fish in the sea, not in fish on the fishmonger's block, and we are all groping around in the dark in the face of impossibly vast and complex problems of social measurement. However, we don't on that basis dismiss history as a worthless enterprise with no truth value, and nor should it be with statistics. If you find the FBI or the Treasury's statistical work inadequate or too easily manipulable, please don't ever read quantitative history, you might have a heart attack.
I'm not suggesting that all statistics everywhere are bad. I'm saying that these statistics, collected by these people, in present America, are bad, and unreliable, as evidenced by the observation that anyone relying on them just a few weeks ago would have completely different conclusions as to etc. etc.
You want to have some sort of tough guy online moment where you call me a coward for not wasting my time parsing through obvious statistical bullshit of the highest order. Silly goose
Not true at all. The statistics have barely changed and one's conclusions should be exactly the same - a very small decrease moving to a very small increase is not important.
I'm just asking you to explain why it's bullshit, not just refuse to engage with any specifics.
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