Claims of Data Manipulation: In 2024, the Biden administration repeatedly asserted that violent crime was at a 50-year low, based on FBI statistics. The FBI defines violent crime as murder, manslaughter, rape, robbery, and aggravated assault.
Ken Alexandrow, a security expert and former Nashville police officer, alleged that the administration manipulated data to achieve this conclusion. “The way crime statistics are developed is that police departments around the nation send all their category 1 crimes, which are violent crimes, to the FBI. And then the FBI develops nationwide statistics,” Alexandrow explained. He claimed that the Biden administration changed reporting from the Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR) program to the National Incident-Based Reporting System (NIBRS).
“If you ask anybody on the street, no one will tell you that they feel safer or that crime is going down. However, it’s the job of any leader, whether they’re local, state, or federal, to make your constituency feel safe. So how can we do that? Well, several police chiefs and city managers have been in trouble for manipulating stats,” Alexandrow said.
Changing Reporting Programs: Alexandrow, who founded Agape Tactical LLC, stated that police departments often remove certain categories of crimes to show a decrease in crime rates. “A city may remove domestic murders one year, and then the next they’ll remove drug-related murders so they’re taking two pieces of the pie out,” he said. “So to manipulate their statistics, they take sections of the population out to prove that they’re doing their job.”
He further alleged that in 2023, 70% of police departments that were reporting under the UCR program stopped reporting under the NIBRS program. “And keep in mind, those are cities, including L.A., Chicago, and New York City, along with 45% of Florida departments, not reporting,” he said. “When you have these major cities not reporting, you’re going to have a tremendous drop in crimes and, therefore, your statistics and your percentages will drop.”
Reported Crime Statistics: In 2024, the Biden-Harris DOJ reported a 17.5% decrease in murder rates, a 7.1% decrease in rape, a 3.6% decrease in aggravated assault, and a 7.8% decline in robbery over the first three quarters of the year. Between 2021 and 2022, violent crime decreased by 1.7%, which became a 3% decrease between 2022 and 2023; and through the second quarter of 2023 to 2024, it went down by 10.3%. The murder rate decreased by 6.1% from 2021 to 2022, by 11.6% in 2023, and finally by 22.7% in 2024. The DOJ noted that the data was from 85 cities but did not specify which cities reported.
Previous Adjustments in Crime Data: In 2022, the Biden administration’s FBI quietly updated its crime data to show an increase in violent crimes despite previous data showing a decrease, which was touted as a victory for the administration. The data was praised by Democrats and the media as a turning point for crime woes in the U.S. after the crime wave of 2020, when defund-the-police protests and riots swept the nation and the pandemic’s stay-at-home orders upended daily life.
Conclusion: The allegations of data manipulation have sparked a debate on the accuracy of crime statistics and the methods used to report them, raising questions about the true state of violent crime in the United States.