The FBI’s Missing Murders

In October, Dr. John Lott of the Crime Prevention Research Center (CPRC) broke the news that the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) had stealth-revised its reported violent crime data for 2022 to show a 4.5% increase, rather than the originally reported 2.1% decrease, for that year. Among other things, that adjustment added 1,699 more murders for 2022. Given that the vast majority of murder crimes are reported, Lott asks, “How do you miss 1,699 murders?”

Now, another source, Just Facts Daily (JFD), a “research institute dedicated to publishing facts about public policies,” has done a dive into homicide reporting and uncovered what appears to be an unusually large number of “homicides recorded on death certificates that are not reported as murders by Biden’s FBI.”

As context, the federal Department of Justice’s Bureau of Justice Statistics explains that the United States relies on “two national data collection systems to track detailed information on homicides: the [FBI’s] Supplementary Homicide Reports and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Fatal Injury Reports.” The Supplementary Homicide Reports (SHR) are part of the FBI’s Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR) Program, while the Fatal Injury Reports are developed from the National Vital Statistics System (NVSS), a public health-based resource maintained at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). The UCR provides aggregate annual counts of the number of homicides across America that come to the attention of law enforcement and which the local or state agency voluntarily reports to the FBI, while the CDC’s mortality data rely on standardized death certificates that must be filed with state vital statistics offices. “Both systems follow the same rules in applying homicide labels to incidents and victims; however, each system has different subcategories of homicide,” although “the NVSS consistently shows a higher number and rate of homicides in the United States compared to the SHR, likely due to the differences in coverage and scope and the voluntary versus mandatory nature of the data collection.”

While a gap between the number of murders reported by the FBI and the number of homicides recorded on death certificates has existed before, as of 2014 the two measurements reportedly reflected similar trends for homicides rates at the national level. Just Facts Daily, though, claims that the raw number differentials between the CDC’s statistics and the FBI’s homicide data have “grown sharply under the Biden administration,” with the number of homicides recorded on death certificates but not reported or shown as murders in the FBI annual data jumping to 4,569 in 2021 and 3,497 in 2023, or an average difference of “3,711 killings per year during Biden’s presidency.”

What’s more, JFD alleges that in 2023, the “FBI inexplicably revised its pre-Biden murder data all the way back to 2003, elevating the counts in certain years by up to 7%. The FBI made these unprecedented alterations without so much as a footnote to inform the public... [T]he scale of the changes that the FBI published in 2023 are far greater than any in the past. Yet, the FBI only included a footnote to alert people to the change for 2021 and none of the other 18 years.”

Examples that JFD highlights include the gap between the CDC and FBI counts during the presidency of George W. Bush, which “remained roughly level at around 9% except for 2001.” Under the retroactive amendments, the FBI “substantially increased murder counts in the earlier years of Bush’s term,” making it appear that the gap increased from about 0% to 9% during that presidency. During Donald Trump’s presidency, the gap increased from 13% to 17%, but the FBI also “irregularly increased the murder counts throughout Trump’s term, making it seem like the gap jumped up and down between 7% to 13%.”

One possible explanation for the discrepancies in the recent FBI data is that in 2021 (as reported by the Crime Prevention Research Center and others), a significant number of local and state law enforcement agencies responsible for feeding their crime statistics into the FBI’s UCR system stopped or reduced their submissions to the FBI. “In 2022, 32% of police departments stopped reporting crime data, and another 24% of departments only reported crime data for some months during the year.” This would, presumably, widen the gap between the CDC’s numbers and those of the FBI, but nonetheless fails to account for revisions to homicide data that predate 2020.     

The FBI has not been open about the need for these changes, or even, it seems, the fact that they were being made. JFD reports that it has unsuccessfully sought the reasons for the revisions using a Freedom of Information Act request filed with the FBI almost six months ago, and through a more recent email to the FBI’s National Press Office. In another instance of less than optimal transparency, an op-ed by Dr. John Lott earlier this fall discussed how the FBI missed or misidentified many cases of defensive gun use and refused to correct its data even after “the blatant omissions” had been pointed out. “The FBI dataset is missing so many defensive gun uses that it’s hard to believe it isn’t intentional and the fact that they never correct mistakes that are brought to their attention is even more damning.”

Such extensive, unexplained changes to public crime statistics are liable to appear as partisan manipulation of government information, especially after the FBI’s data was found to mirror President Biden’s election talking points on record-low violent crime before it was quietly revised to show otherwise. Too many Americans already view the FBI as untrustworthy and politically biased. A 2023 poll asking which actions should be taken against the FBI in the wake of the Durham report had only 15% of respondents replying that the FBI should be left alone. The highest percentage of participants (39%) felt the agency should be “reformed by Congress to keep it from meddling in future elections,” while the next highest (24%) went for the more nuclear option – the FBI should be “shut down and rebuilt from scratch, it can’t be trusted to do its job.”

Reform and change may be on the horizon. President-elect Donald Trump swept into office on promises to cut government waste and clean house, with a proposed new Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). While the FBI is unlikely to be on the DOGE chopping block, there are no doubt some interesting times ahead for government agencies that fail to meet even minimal standards for data transparency and accuracy.