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I followed the links to the original reporter, and then did a not-too-deep dive into the FBI Uniform Crime Statistics.
The way I see it, there are three separate questions at hand:
1 How many violent crimes were there in US, in reality? (In time-series sense.)
2 How does FBI collect and measure (or estimate) that statistic? Have they changed that methodology? How do their estimates compare to other good estimates (like the National Crime Victimization Survey, for example)?
3 How have politicians used the FBI statistics.
The first question can only be glanced through a dark distorted glass of statistics, and it's always important to remember that any specific estimates have a particular methodology, which can be more or less flawed.
For the second question, the important bit of info is that the FBI changed its methodology at the beginning of 2021 (PDF warning, my highlights):
Looking at the graph of all violent offenses in US in the past 5 years, it's clear that there are statistical artifacts. For example, before 2021 every year has a bump in December, which is unlikely to correspond to actual huge increase in crime and more likely is police precincts catching up on their paperwork.
The other important bit of info is that, in that transition year 2021, only 2/3rd of population are covered by the reporting precincts, as opposed to before (95%-ish) or after (90%-ish). So any comparison to the year 2021 will be junk.
I can't find the links right now, but my recollection is that the stats for the year 2022 were adjusted because a lot more precincts caught up on their reporting for that year.
PS. Yes, the FBI should be more responsible in clearly communicating their updates to the public.
IIRC, the FBI classifies most Hispanics as white, so there is no way to see the crime rate of (what most people think of as) white perpetrators except in the rapidly dwindling number of areas where Latinos are rare or absent.
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Without fail, huge chances of any major statistical trend being an artifact of changing methodology. Thanks for doing the work.
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