There is a lot of attention on the Trump administration removing dozens of Department of Justice (DOJ) and FBI officials involved in charging 1,500 Jan. 6 defendants, but one area of politicization in the FBI and DOJ that isn’t getting attention: crime data.
The ability to manipulate and distort crime data allows those distorting the data to control the political debate.
I’ve seen many cases of politicized data. Until January 2021, I worked in the U.S. Department of Justice as the senior advisor for research and statistics in the Office of Justice Programs, and part of my job was to evaluate the FBI’s active shooting reports. During my time with the DOJ, I discovered that the FBI either missed or misidentified many cases of civilians using guns to stop attacks. For instance, the FBI continues to report that armed citizens stopped only 14 of the 350 active shooter cases identified between 2014 to 2023.
The Crime Prevention Research Center (CPRC), which I run, has found many more missed cases and is keeping an updated list. As such, the CPRC numbers tell a much different story: Out of 515 active shooter incidents from 2014 to 2023, armed citizens stopped 180, saving countless innocent lives. Our numbers even excluded 27 cases where a law-abiding citizen with a gun stopped an attacker before he could fire a shot.
Overall, the CPRC estimates that law-abiding citizens with guns have stopped more than 35 percent of active shootings over the last decade and 39.6 percent in the last five years. This figure is almost nine times higher than the four percent estimate made by the FBI.
This figure increases even more when looking only at areas where citizens are legally allowed to carry a firearm. After all, you can’t expect that law-abiding citizens will stop attacks in gun-free zones. In places where law-abiding citizens are allowed to carry firearms, we estimate that armed civilians stopped 51 percent of active shootings over the past decade.
Unfortunately, the FBI dataset is missing so many defensive gun uses that it’s hard to believe it is accidental, and especially as they also never corrected mistakes that I brought to their attention. Since we list out each case and link to the underlying sources, no one needs to take our word for these missing or misidentified cases.
The FBI also has a big transparency problem, and their actions came to a head during last year’s presidential election. For a year, the media used the FBI’s estimates of reported crime for 2022 to claim that crime was falling under the Biden administration. Relying on the 2022 data, news headlines like NPR asserted: “Violent crime is dropping fast in the US — even if Americans don’t believe it.”
ABC’s David Muir used this misleading data to “fact check” Donald Trump during the presidential debate against Kamala Harris. “Crime here is up and through the roof despite their fraudulent statements that they made,” Trump said.
Muir rebutted him with, “President Trump, as you know, the FBI says overall violent crime is actually coming down in this country.”
Trump was right. When the FBI released its numbers for 2023 in September 2024, it hid that it had revised its earlier crime data for 2021 and 2022, hiding the increase in 2022.
The FBI press release never mentioned that the bureau had revised its violent crime for 2022 data from a 2.1 percent drop to a 4.5 percent increase. Their full report itself only vaguely mentioned that they had revised the data in a footnote. Just days before an election in which crime was been a top issue for voters, despite repeated requests for clarification from the press, the FBI continued to hide the revisions.
The FBI isn’t the only agency that hides or distorts data. The Centers for Disease Control (CDC) under the Biden administration suppressed data proving that armed citizens help prevent crime by removing its estimates of defensive gun uses from its website. For almost a decade, the CDC referenced a 2013 National Academies of Sciences report noting that people used guns to stop crime anywhere from about 64,000 to 3 million times a year.
That decision to remove the data came after gun control activist Mark Bryant, founder of the Gun Violence Archive, lobbied the CDC to remove defensive gun use estimates because it “has been used so often to stop [gun control] legislation” by “gun rights folks.” Soon after, the CDC removed estimates of defensive gun use from their website.
There are severe problems with other government crime data, such as the hate crime counts that depend on subjective reports.
Unfortunately, the news media unquestioningly reports these government numbers, and politicians reference them in political debates. And they are constantly used in court cases. We can’t have useful debates about crime policy if the data underlying those debates is inaccurate and politically biased.
I hope the Trump administration will soon restore objectivity to the federal government’s crime statistics.
Jesus Christ is King
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