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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.
Lott's website has a better breakdown of how the revision applied, and it's worth noting that there were both decreases in the (non-rape?) 2021 numbers and increases in the 2022 ones.
More subtly, it shows that only through such third-party groups can such revisions be visible at all.
There's a deeper problem where everyone apparently knew this metric was bullshit, so there's no reason to think the newer numbers are 'real', but it's a little aggravating to see these things getting used as both political and policy sledgehammers on one hand and dismissed wholesale in the other.
Apropos of nothing, still no response from the ProPublica author from a few weeks back. Her coworker was so certain "Reporters love talking to people about journalism", too.
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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.
Yeah, a lot of government economic stats feel super fake.
For example, the rate of inflation depends on so-called "hedonic adjustments". I'll admit that this is a valid methodology. For example, a TV today is miles better than a TV from 2002. But, as I've written before, these hedonic adjustments DON'T take into account other things like the degradation in service quality. In 2002 the Starbucks bathroom wasn't locked. Today it is. Where's the hedonic adjustment for that?
When we remove hedonic adjustments, inflation is much, much higher than the official numbers. The official numbers also just don't pass the smell test.
Then we get to "unemployment". It's super fake. The male, prime age employment rate was nearly 95% in 1968. Today, it is just 86%. That's 9% of men age 25-54 who are not employed. But they are not counted as "unemployed" either. It's all fugazi.
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LREM25MAUSA156S
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Isn’t boring and dull bureaucratic number crunching the opposite of “made up”? I wouldn’t want these numbers influenced by someone putting their finger on the scale because they know better than the data. I’m sure it happens anyways, but I don’t see how your argument justifies what you’re claiming.
No, it means that they are "made up" out of the distortions and idiosyncracies of a horribly-kludged procedure on its 44th revision from an original 1987 typewritten spiral-bound handbook, which has been subject to a constant distortionary tug-of-war to drag it closer to the political expediency of the day, or the latest appointee's personal policy judgment.
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Makes me wonder how many more “adjustments” will be made to 2023 numbers in the future. Although I’m not surprised at all yet another government agency is fudging data in a partisan manner.
And didn’t one of the debate moderators “fact check” Trump using this very same FBI data? The election has already been rigged, yet again, by misinformation peddlers.
I haven’t read up on this case as much, but if it’s anything like the employment stats revision, are you implying that official stats shouldn’t be revised in the face of new information?
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