Exclusive: GOP rep demands answers from FBI over ‘misguided’ crime stats

Republican Texas Rep. Lance Gooden is demanding the FBI answer questions about the alleged gaps in their recently released 2023 crime report that paints a misleading picture of crime, according to a letter provided to the Daily Caller News Foundation.

Gooden is joined by Republican Texas Rep. Randy Weber and Republican Wisconsin Rep. Tom Tiffany in the letter questioning the FBI crime data’s validity, pointing to the agency’s past of “inaccurate claims” on crime by omitting certain department’s data from their numbers, according to the letter. The FBI data showed a 3% reduction in violent crime in 2023, which Gooden says in the letter “couldn’t be further from the truth.”

“Underreporting or misreporting crime statistics significantly impacts public perception and policy decisions, leading to a misunderstanding of crime trends, which causes unwarranted fear or complacency,” Gooden said in the letter. “Cherry-picking statistical data to deliberately mislead the public into thinking their community is safer than before would be an abhorrent act of ‘misinformation,’ especially considering the source of the misguided claim is an elite federal law enforcement agency.”

The letter asks several questions to the FBI, such as if they omitted any data from various major cities, how many agencies provided incomplete data, and if the data would be retroactively adjusted to reflect an increase in violent crime as it had in 2022 according to the Crime Prevention Research Center. In 2022, over 6,000 agencies did not report data to the FBI, accounting for 32% of all police departments in the U.S., according to the letter.

President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris have been touting the newly released data, saying that violent crime is at a “50-year low” and crediting their American Rescue Plan bill for the alleged decrease, according to a September White House press release. Most recently, the FBI published a quarterly report that reported for the first six months of 2024 that violent crime was down 10.3% compared to the first six months of 2023, according to an FBI press release.

However, the data only counted reports from 72% of law enforcement agencies, according to the press release. It is also unclear which agencies are omitted in the quarterly report.

Another survey of crime in the nation is the National Crime Victimization Survey (NVCS) carried out by the Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS), which showed from 2021 to 2023, the NVCS reported a 36% increase in the violent crime victimization rate, according to the report. The UCR and the NVCS differed substantially, differing by over 45% in 2022, according to the Marshall Project in 2023.

“If key data about the actual criminal activity in our cities is missing, it has not been reflected in either your claim or the accompanying press release,” Gooden said in the letter. “A selective and deliberate omission of relevant and necessary context amounts to an inexcusable case of spreading ‘misinformation’ by an agency of the Federal government.”

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