We might call the game “smug-upmanship,” where participants in a debate “fact-check” their opponents in the most smug way, pretending they have “the facts” on their side when, in reality, the facts are uncertain, filled with errors, or merely lies. In cases where the facts are dubious at best, the element of smugness helps. It’s a form of self-consciousness and ‑confidence. And when someone, in debate, exudes so much confidence in a fact or argument, and — during the course of the debate — you cannot readily demonstrate the opposite as true, it’s easy to be bowled over.
On July 30, in “Crime’s Ups and Downs,” Paul Jacob considered what became the Democrats’ smuggest fact-check of the year, the “fact” that the violent crime rate has gone down, not up. Trump said it was up. The FBI said it was down. End of debate?
Jacob Sullum at Reason repeated the Democrats’ take on “the facts,” blaming Trump for crime rising, briefly, on his watch. But Paul Jacob saw a few problems:
Crime spiked in the “Summer of Love” as a result of the mass protests against George Floyd’s death, the left’s demands to “defund the police,” and the climate of approved (“mostly peaceful”) violent riot. Trump’s enemies caused all this. Much of it may have been fueled by pandemic anxieties, but there was another factor: the Democrats’ anarcho-tyranny push to pry Trump out of office in annus horribilis 2020.
Since then crime, which is usually under-reported, now appears to be increasingly under-reported for systemic reasons. Some crimes, such as theft, have been demoted in the law books, allowing theft to run rampant in several major American cities — not just San Francisco — thereby disallowing the uptick in crime to even hit the stats.
What if bad data is the consequence of such policy?
Meaning the perception of an increase in crime is true … at least in some places.
Paul Jacob, “Crime’s Ups and Downs,” July 30, 2024.
Well, now the stats have been revised.
John R. Lott, Jr., argues in his Real Clear Investigations exposé “Stealth Edit: FBI Quietly Revises Violent Crime Stats,” that the initial report of 2.1 percent drop in crime in 2022 depended entirely on under-reporting by cities of actual crimes — and the FBI not adequately figuring for the lack of data. And then not telling us even as it has later accounted for the actual data:
[T]he FBI has quietly revised those numbers, releasing new data that shows violent crime increased in 2022 by 4.5%. The new data includes thousands more murders, rapes, robberies, and aggravated assaults.The Bureau — which has been at the center of partisan storms — made no mention of these revisions in its September 2024 press release.
RCI discovered the change through a cryptic reference on the FBI website that states: “The 2022 violent crime rate has been updated for inclusion in CIUS, 2023.” But there is no mention that the numbers increased. One only sees the change by downloading the FBI’s new crime data and comparing it to the file released last year.
John R. Lott, Jr., “Stealth Edit: FBI Quietly Revises Violent Crime Stats,” Real Clear Investigations, October 16, 2024.
The FBI may have merely erred in its initial report — though that’s unlikely — but it lied in the correction, failing to disclose the magnitude of the original error. The correction was a cover-up.
The Democrats, for their part, engaged in typical smug rhetoric.
And Reason got the chance to stick it, once again, to Donald Trump.
But this seems clear: anyone with a nose for how governments lie, routinely and in partisan fashion, should have caught at least a whiff of this.