J. Edgar Hoover Building, 935 Pennsylvania Avenue NW, Washington, DC
And start over from scratch. That’s what needs to happen with the Federal Bureau of Investigation.
In exhibit 13,759,034 of how the agency has become a hack-ridden partisan mess, we have the news breaking today that the Bureau ‘revised’ the crime stats from 2022. It was not a small revision, the new data represents a reversal from a 2.1 percent decrease to a 4.5 percent increase. It also shows thousands of new rapes, armed robberies and murders.
To make matters worse, the FBI actively tried to hide the revisions. There was no mention of the revisions in the annual September crime stats press release. The only indication of the changes is a small, cryptic note on the FBI website saying “The 2022 violent crime rate has been updated for inclusion in CIUS, 2023.” There is no mention of the revisions and the only way to find them is to compare the original data with the newly revised data.
According to Carl Moody, a professor at the College of William & Mary who specializes in studying crime, said “I have checked the data on total violent crime from 2004 to 2022 . . . There were no revisions from 2004 to 2015, and from 2016 to 2020, there were small changes of less than one percentage point. The huge changes in 2021 and 2022, especially without an explanation, make it difficult to trust the FBI data.”
I really think it’s time to start over. Break up the entire agency, fire everyone in management, move the HQ to Great Bend Kansas, and rebuild from the ground up.