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[Federalist] The FBI doesn’t just have a transparency problem. They’re actually distorting data to skew important crime statistics.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.”