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Notes -
Lott's blog post raises more questions than it answers. At first, I had no idea where he gets his headline claim that 1,699 murders were 'missed'. In the spreadsheets he himself links, the old data shows 21,156 murders for 2022, and the new data 21,781, and the rates are in fact identical (at least to one decimal place). The difference in total violent crime doesn't match his headline estimate either.
On further inspection, what he's actually done is added together the revisions from 2021 and 2022 irrespective of whether the revisions were up or down. So since the FBI has revised their 2021 homicide estimates down slightly and their 2022 estimates up slightly he's added the changes up and got his figure of 1,699. However, this means his headline that the FBI 'missed 1,699 homicides in 2022' is flatly wrong in any reasonable reading. It's such a bizarre way of reaching that number it's hard not to chalk it up to a deliberate attempt to make the change seem bigger than it actually was.
If we take the blinkers off for a second, these revisions are really not that meaningful. All that's happened is that a very small decrease has been turned into a very small increase - politically this may be important insofar as appearing to be moving in the right direction is useful, but in reality it's just meaningless noise. The old figure of 377.1 total violent crimes per 100,000 has been replaced with a figure of 377.6, a 0.13% difference. Utter nothingburger that should not change anyone's opinion on anything.
The revisions themselves are not surprising and probably shouldn't be taken as strong evidence of anything in particular. But it's not a "nothingburger" when the news media, politicians, etc. use a negative number to "fact check" and excoriate opponents, only to later have that number instead turn out to be positive. Either the numbers mean something or they don't. If the numbers do mean something, then all the news corporations that said "Trump was wrong" should now be printing stories saying "sorry, turns out Trump was right." If the numbers don't mean anything, then all the original news stories saying "Trump was wrong" should have been laughed out of the room from the get-go. Publishing numbers widely because they make your opponent look maximally bad, then ignoring revisions to those numbers, just shows how much the corporate news media (sometimes, Fox News excepted) has straightforwardly become the propaganda arm of the Democratic Party.
That is far from a "nothingburger."
Not necessarily. In fact, because the revisions are so small the numbers mean pretty much exactly what they did before - and if they do mean anything, what they probably mean is 'crime didn't deviate from it's previous trajectory a great deal'. Of course, this in turn doesn't necessarily imply any conclusion about the impact of BLM/changes to police policy, as who knows, without it maybe crime would have gone down by some non-trivial amount. News media should report on the change, but it shouldn't change their conclusions about anything. Trump saying 'crime is only going up' is still not really a statement that can be justified by the statistics in all but the most trivial sense. Even post-revision the 2022 figures were similar to the 2021 and 2020 figures (notwithstanding the problems with the 2021 statistics). While some of the fact-checking on Republican rhetoric on crime was probably over-zealous, that rhetoric was still wildly misleading. There was no surge in crime as constantly espoused by Republicans. Anyone saying 'crime is plummeting' was lying too (even if the pre-revision stats had turned out to be correct), but I don't think anyone was following that line as prominently or as vociferously as Republicans pursued the reverse narrative.
Stuff like this;
is still utterly false. In fact 2023 crime is back down below 2019 levels. This proves nothing either because the margins are so fine. But Trump is and was wrong.
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