Last Updated on 11/09/2024 by Arun jain
Claim: During Tuesday’s presidential debate with Vice President Kamala Harris, former President Donald Trump claimed the FBI’s report on low violent crime was a “hoax.”
Verdict: True. The FBI’s reports do not include the thousands of police precincts that do not report crime data to the federal agency.
On June 24, 2024, Breitbart News Quote President Joe Biden’s words to Everytown for Gun Safety, where he said:
You know, the year before I took office, the homicide rate was the highest on record. Last year, we saw the largest drop in homicides in the history of the (inaudible). (Applause.) And those rates are falling faster than ever. Last year, we also saw the lowest rate of all violent crime in nearly 50 years. Burglary and property crimes along with murder, rape, aggravated assault, robbery have come down sharply.
Breitbart News noted that Biden did not mention that 2021 and 2022 saw a drop in crime reports from police precincts across the country.
The Marshall Project Explained That in 2020, “almost every law enforcement agency was included in the FBI’s database.” However, in 2021, the FBI moved to a new system for compiling data and will only accept police precinct reports through the new system.
The result? “Thousands of police agencies fell through the cracks because they couldn’t catch the changes in time.” Thus, in 2022, there were very few police precincts in the crime data. The Marshall Project reported in 2023 that “more than 6,000 law enforcement agencies were missing from the FBI’s national crime data last year, representing about one-third of the nation’s 18,000 police agencies.”
Trump was right to point out the inaccuracy of the low violent crime numbers. The report from which those numbers were taken is incomplete.
AWR Hawkins is an award-winning Second Amendment columnist and writer/curator for Breitbart News. Down range with AWR HawkinsA weekly newsletter focused on all things Second Amendment, including for Breitbart News. He is a political analyst for Armed American Radio, a member of Gun Owners of America, a Pulsar Night Vision Pro-Staffer and Global Marketing Director for Lone Star Hunts. He was a visiting fellow at the Russell Kirk Center for Cultural Renewal in 2010 and received his Ph.D. in military history. Follow him on Instagram: @awr_hawkins. You can sign up to get the lowdown on breitbart.com/downrange. Reach him directly: [email protected].
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